Yet I thought I saw her stand,

A shadow there at my feet,

High over the shadowy land.

—tennyson, Maud (1855)

Perhaps one can find more color for the myth of a rational human behavior in an iron age like the Victorian than in most others. Charles had certainly decided, after his night of rebellion, to go through with his marriage to Ernestina. It had never seriously entered his mind that he would not; Ma Terpsichore’s and the prostitute had but been, unlikely though it may seem, confirmations of that intention—last petulant doubts of a thing concluded, last questionings of the unquestionable. He had said as much to himself on his queasy return home, which may explain the rough treatment Sam received. As for Sarah ... the other Sarah had been her surrogate, her sad and sordid end, and his awakening.

For all that, he could have wished her letter had shown a clearer guilt—that she had asked for money (but she could hardly have spent ten pounds in so short a time), or poured out her illicit feelings for him. But it is difficult to read either passion or despair into the three words. “Endicott’s Family Hotel”; and not even a date, an initial! It was certainly an act of disobedience, a by-passing of Aunt Tranter; but she could hardly be arraigned for knocking on his door.

It was easy to decide that the implicit invitation must be ignored: he must never see her again. But perhaps Sarah the prostitute had reminded Charles of the uniqueness of Sarah the outcast: that total absence of finer feeling in the one only affirmed its astonishing survival in the other. How shrewd and sensitive she was, in her strange way . . . some of those things she had said after her confession—they haunted one.

He thought a great deal—if recollection is thought—about Sarah on the long journey down to the West. He could not but feel that to have committed her to an institution, howev-er enlightened, would have been a betrayal. I say “her,” but the pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented; what came to Charles was not a pronoun, but eyes, looks, the line of the hair over a temple, a nimble step, a sleeping face. All this was not daydreaming, of course; but earnest consideration of a moral problem and caused by an augustly pure solicitude for the unfortunate woman’s future welfare.

The train drew into Exeter. Sam appeared, within a brief pause of its final stopping whistle, at the window of the compartment; he of course had traveled in the third c............