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Rh guards against the selfishness contracted in the world: but left to be that character's sole matériel, there was no strength to meet sorrow, no reality to ballast romance. A chain of small but unfortunate events had brought her into continual contact with Lorraine. Daily intercourse first gave attachment all the force of habit;—loneliness next gave all the refining exaggeration of utterly unemployed fancy;—and love had become to Emily an imaginary world, where thoughts, hopes, feelings, were all gathered and confided. The wreck was total—as total as that ever is which trusts its all to one argosy. The great happiness-secret, after all, is division. How dare we, in this vain, fleeting world, concentrate our whole freight of interest in one frail bark? The night was oppressively hot—perhaps the weight at her own heart added to the oppression. She drew to the open window, purple with the night-shadows, made dimly distinct by here and there a distant star; the gulf beneath blended in the darkness, till but one atmosphere seemed both above and below, sometimes illumined by flashes of phosphoric light—meteors that might have suited sea or sky, and, broken by two or three ridges of