“Ah! they told you that,” said he, coloring with pleasurable pride. “Well, it's quite true. The fact is correct, but I don't know what explanation they have given of it!”
“There was none, sir,—or, at least, none that deserved the name.”
“Then what was your own reading of it?” asked he.
“Simply this, sir: that a proud man may very well serve in the ranks, but spurn the grade of a petty officer.”
“By Jove; it is strange to find that a young lady should understand one's motives better than an old Minister,” said he, with an evident satisfaction.
“It would be unjust, sir, were I to arrogate any credit to my own perspicuity in this case,” said she, hastily; “for I was aided in my judgment by what, very probably, never came under the Minister's eyes.”
“And what was that?”
“A little volume which I discovered one day in the library, entitled 'Days of the Historical Society of Trinity College,' wherein I found Mr. Repton's name not only one of the first in debate, but the very first in enunciating the great truths of political liberty. In fact, I might go further, and say, the only one who had the courage to proclaim the great principles of the French Revolution.”
“Ah,—yes. I was a boy,—a mere boy,—very rash,—full of hope,—full of enthusiasm,” said Repton, with an embarrassment that increased at every word. “We all took fire from the great blaze beside us just then; but, my dear young lady, the flame has died out,—very fortunately, too; for if it had n't, it would have burned us up with it. We were wrong,—wrong with Burke, to be sure,—Errare Platone, as one may say,—but still wrong.”
“You were wrong, sir, in confounding casualties with true consequences; wrong as a physician would be who abandoned his treatment from mistaking the symptoms of disease for the effects of medicine. You set out by declaring there was a terrible malady to be treated, and you shrink back affrighted at the first results of your remedies; you did worse; you accommodated your change of principles to party, and from the great champions of liberty you descended to be—modern Whigs!”