‘No, no, nonsense, it is no paltry jealousy; only now I can speak to you, I must,’ said Robert, who had been in vain craving for this opportunity of getting his sister alone, ever since the alarm excited by Lucilla’s words.
‘What is this harm, Robin?’
‘Say not a word of it. Miss Charlecote’s heart must not be broken before its time, and at any rate it shall not come through me.’
‘What, Robert?’
‘The knowledge of what he is. Don’t say it is prejudice. I know I never liked him, but you shall hear why. You ought now—’
Robert’s mind had often of late glanced back to the childish days when, with their present opinions reversed, he thought Owen a muff, and Owen thought him a reprobate. To his own blunt and reserved nature, the expressions, so charming to poor Miss Charlecote, had been painfully distasteful. Sentiment, profession, obtrusive reverence, and fault-finding scruples had revolted him, even when he thought it a proof of his own irreligion to be provoked. Afterwards, when both were schoolboys, Robert had yearly increased in conscientiousness under good discipline and training, but, in their holiday meetings, had found Owen’s standard receding as his own advanced, and heard the once-deficient manly spirit asserted by boasts of exploits and deceptions repugnant to a well-conditioned lad. He saw Miss
Charlecote’s perfect confidence abused and trifled with, and the more he grew in a sense of honour, the more he disliked Owen Sandbrook.
At the University, where Robert’s career had been respectable and commonplace, Owen was at once a man of mark. Mental and physical powers alike rendered him foremost among his compeers; he could compete with the fast, and surpass the slow on their own ground; and his talents, ready celerity, good-humoured audacity, and quick resource, had always borne him through with the authorities, though there was scarcely an excess or irregularity in which he was not a partaker; and stories of Sandbrook’s daring were always circulating among the undergraduates. But though Robert could have scared Phœbe with many a history of lawless pranks, yet these were not his chief cause for dreading Owen’s intimacy with her. It was that he was one of the youths on whom the spirit of the day had most influence, one of the most adventurous thinkers and boldest talkers: wild in habits, not merely from ebullition of spirits, but from want of faith in the restraining power.
All this Robert briefly expressed in the words, ‘Phœbe, it is not that his habits are irregular and unsteady; many are so whose hearts are sound. But he is not sound—his opinions are loose, and he only respects and patronizes Divine Truth as what has approved itself to so many good, great, and beloved human creatures. It is not denial—it is patronage. It is the commonsense heresy—’
‘I thought we all ought to learn common sense.’