‘Have you not overlooked one thing which may be the truth,’ said Alethea, as if she was asking for information, ‘that duty and love may be identical? Is not St. Paul’s description of charity very like the duty to our neighbour?’
‘The practice is the same, but not the theory,’ said Lily.
‘Now, what is called duty, seems to me to be love doing unpleasant work,’ said Miss Weston; ‘love disguised under another name, when obliged to act in a way which seems, only seems, out of accordance with its real title.’
‘That is all very well for those who have love,’ said Lily. ‘Some have not who do their duty conscientiously—another word which I hate, by the bye.’
‘They have love in a rough coat, perhaps,’ said Alethea, ‘and I should expect it soon to put on a smoother one.’
CHAPTER VII
SIR MAURICE
‘Shall thought was his, in after time,
Thus to be hitched into a rhyme;
The simple sire could only boast
That he was loyal to his cost,
The banished race of kings revered,
And lost his land.’
The holidays arrived, and with them the three brothers, for during the first few weeks of the Oxford vacation Claude accompanied Lord Rotherwood on visits to some college friends, and only came home the same day as the younger ones.
Maurice did not long leave his sisters in doubt as to what was to be his reigning taste, for as soon as dinner was over, he made Jane find the volume of the Encyclopædia containing Entomology, and with his elbows on the table, proceeded to study it so intently, that the young ladies gave up all hopes of rousing him from it. Claude threw himself down on the sofa to enjoy the luxury of a desultory talk with his sisters; and Reginald, his head on the floor, and his heels on a chair, talked loud and fast enough for all three, with very little regard to what the damsels might be saying.
‘Oh! Claude,’ said Lily, ‘you cannot think how much we like Miss Weston, she lets us call her Alethea, and—’