THE TOUCHSTONE
"That it does her no good—all you're feeling, all you're suffering. Can it be that it makes no difference?"
He avoided her challenging glance. "What's done is done," he muttered.
"Is it ever, quite, I wonder?" she mused. He made no answer and they lapsed into one of the pauses that are a subterranean channel of communication.
It was she who, after a while, began to speak, with a new suffusing diffidence that made him turn a roused eye on her.
"Don't they say," she asked, feeling her way as in a kind of tender apprehensiveness, "that the early Christians, instead of pulling down the heathen temples—the temples of the unclean gods—purified them by turning them to their own uses? I've always thought one might do that with one's actions—the actions one loathes but can't undo. One can make, I mean, a wrong the door to other wrongs or an impassable wall against them. . ." Her voice wavered on the word. "We can't always tear down
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