“As far as you are personally concerned, I could not hope to meet a man to whom I should give my daughter with greater confidence. Your temperament is exactly what she needs to correct her own tendency to emotionalism. You see, I am frank with you, Duke, as frank as you have been with me. I have watched over my daughter with all the powers of observation I possess from her earliest years, and I cannot shut my eyes to her weakness.”
“Miss Vanbrugh is as near perfection as any girl I have seen!” exclaimed the wooer, with unwonted enthusiasm. “If she has a weakness it is in being too ready to sacrifice herself for others.”
“That is the weakness I mean,” the scientist resumed calmly. “Her attraction towards Catholicism has given me some anxiety, and would give me more if I thought it went below the surface.”
“But you are not a Protestant?”
Sir Bernard Vanbrugh smiled at the old-fashioned word.
“There are no more Protestants,” he pronounced. “There is Science and there is Superstition. Religion, as I understand it, is a form of hysteria, skilfully exploited in the interests of the clerical class. To me as a physician this Catholic revival is the symptom of a widespread cerebral disease which attacks individuals of morbid temperament. I have watched the class of persons who exhibit the symptom, and I have seldom failed to trace the disease. On the whole I am inclined to diagnose it as an obscure form of sexual perversion. A woman does not want to go to confession unless she has something to confess.”
The Home Secretary shivered, as he listened to this brutal analysis, with the same sense of discomfort as a thinly-clad man exposed to a cold blast of air. He was not the first man who had experienced the same sensation in listening to Bernard Vanbrugh.
A week later he received the scientist’s decision.
“It gives me great pain,” Sir Bernard wrote, “not to be able to accept your proposal for my daughter’s hand, but your family history is too bad. Personally, you are everything that a father could desire, but my grandchildren must not have in their veins the same blood as Lord Alistair Stuart.”