"Vous convenez donc de la justice de ma proposition, qu'auprès de vous on ne peut être philosophe?"[9]
I shook my head and held up my hand at him, not knowing exactly how to answer: he seized it, and pressed it fervently to his lips. My mother, I saw, enjoyed this dialogue; but my own heart reproached me for having allowed myself to be amused and flattered into a sort of infidelity to Seymour, by a man too who would be, I foresaw, warmly encouraged by my mother.
By this conversation, which has never been effaced from my memory, you will suspect that my flippancy and the evident pleasure with which I kept it up, were proofs that nothing but a prior attachment could have preserved my affections from the power of De Walden, when he once displayed to me all the variety of his talents, and the graces of his mind. Even as it was, they would have had a more certain effect, but for the injudicious eagerness with which my mother tried to force a conviction of them upon me; for then my alarmed feelings took the part of Seymour, and I was piqued into underrating her idol, because she seemed to overrate him. How very rarely is it that one can obtain or give an opinion uninfluenced by temper, prejudice, or interest!
"Is he not very handsome?" she used to say.
"Yes, but I have seen a handsomer man."
"Oh, you mean Seymour; he is handsomer certainly, but then he is not near so tall."
"No, but he is better made."
"That I never remarked; and I hope you will only impart the result of your observation to me: others might think it indelicate. What a fine countenance he has!"
"Yes, sometimes, but not always; and I prefer one that is always so: I like perpetual rather than occasional sun-shine.—It is disagreeable to have to watch the sun peeping out from behind clouds."
"Helen, Helen!" replied my mother, "weak, foolish girl! to like what no one can on earth obtain—perpetual sun-shine in the moral world! And after all, when one considers what this life is, its long pains and its short pleasures, the riches of one day succeeded by the poverty of the next, the ties which are firmly knit only to be severed in a moment, and our capacity and cause for enjoyment never equal to our capability and cause of suffering; my child, what a poor, thoughtless, frivolous being must that be, whose lip can always smile, and whose eye can always sparkle, whom fears for himself can never depress, nor fears for time or for eternity, or anxiety for the welfare or the peace of others, can alarm into self-government!"