I sat alone on the sofa below, for a whole hour. Not once was the bell rung; not once did my fluttering heart answer to footsteps in the passage. I had no need to start up at the opening of the parlour-door, and to greet, as distinctly as the joyous tumult of my bosom would suffer me, the much-loved, long-expected visitant.
Yet, deceived by my fond heart into momentary forgetfulness of the interval of a hundred miles that lies between us, more than once I cast a glance behind me, and started, as if the hoped-for peal had actually been rung.
Tired, at length, of my solitude, where I had enjoyed your company so often, I covered up the coals and withdrew to my chamber. "And here," said I, "though I cannot talk to him, yet I can write."
But first, I read over again this cruel letter of my mother. I weighed all the contents, and especially those heavy charges against you.
How does it fall out that the same object is viewed by two observers with such opposite sensations? That what one hates, the other should dote upon?--two of the same sex; one cherished from infancy, reared, modelled, taught to think, feel, and even to speak, by the other: acting till now, and even now acting in all respects but one, in inviolable harmony; that two such should jar and thwart each other, in a point, too, in respect to which the whole tendency and scope of the daughter's education was to produce a fellow-feeling with the mother. How hard to be accounted for! how deeply to be rued!
I sometimes catch myself trembling with solicitude lest I should have erred. Am I not betrayed by passion? can I claim the respect due to that discernment which I once boasted?
I cannot blame my mother. She acts and determines, as I sometimes believe, without the benefits of my knowledge. Did she know as much as I know, surely she would think as I do.
In general, this conclusion seems to be just; but there are moments when doubts insinuate themselves. I cannot help remembering the time when I reasoned like my mother; when the belief of a Christian seemed essential to every human excellence. All qualities, without that belief, were not to be despised as useless, but to be abhorred as pernicious. There would be no virtue, no merit, divorced from religion. In proportion to the speciousness of his qualities was he to be dreaded. The fruit, whatever form it should assume, was nothing within but bane, and was to be detested and shunned in proportion as the form was fair and its promises delicious.
I seldom trusted myself to inquire how it was my duty to act towards one whom I loved, but who was destitute of this grace; for of such moment was the question to me, that I imagined the decision would necessarily precede all others. I could not love till I had investigated this point, and no force could oblige me to hold communion with a soul whom this defect despoiled of all beauty and devoted to perdition.
But what now is the change that time and passion have wrought! I have found a man without religion. What I supposed impossible has happened. I love the man. I cannot give him up. The mist that is before my eyes does not change what was once vice into virtue. I do not cease to regard unbelief as the blackest stain, as the most deplorable calamity that can befall a human creature; but still I love the man, and that fills me with unconquerable zeal to rescue him from this calamity.