“How long would my motives be pure?” said Norman. “Rivalry and party-spirit make me distrust my motives, and then my principles feel the shock. Other men are marked by station for such trials, and may be carried through them, but I am not.”
“Yet some of these men are far from your equals.”
“Not perhaps in speechifying,” said Norman, smiling; “but in steadiness of aim, in patience, in callousness, in seeing one side of the question at once.”
“You judge rightly for your own peace; you will be the happier; I always doubted whether you had nerve to make your wits available.”
“It may be cowardice,” said Norman, “but I think not. I could burn for the combat; and if I had no scruples, I could enjoy bearing down such as—”
Of course Dr. May burst in with a political name, and—“I wish you were at him!”
“Whether I could is another matter,” said Norman, laughing; “but the fact is, that I stand pledged; and if I embraced what to me would be a worldly career, I should be running into temptation, and could not expect to be shielded from it.”
“Your old rule,” said Dr. May. “Seek to be less rather than more. But there is another choice. Why not a parsonage at home?”
“Pleasant parishes are not in the same need,” said Norman.
“I wonder what poor old Rivers would say to you, if he knew what you want to do with his daughter! Brought up as she has been—to expose her to the roughness of a colonial life, such as I should hesitate about for your sisters.”