Her breath hung for the answer, sedately though she sat.
“The woman’s father is dead, I hear,” Colonel Halkett remarked.
“But he has not been there?”
“How can I tell? He’s anywhere, wherever his passions whisk him.”
“No!”
“I say, yes. And if he has money, we shall see him going sky-high and scattering it in sparks, not merely spending; I mean living immorally, infidelizing, republicanizing, scandalizing his class and his country.”
“Oh no!” exclaimed Cecilia, rising and moving to the window to feast her eyes on driving clouds, in a strange exaltation of mind, secretly sure now that her idea of Nevil’s having gone over to France was groundless; and feeling that she had been unworthy of him who strove to be “worthier of her, as he hoped to become.”
Colonel Halkett scoffed at her “Oh no,” and called it woman’s logic.
She could not restrain herself. “Have you forgotten Mr. Austin, papa? It is Nevil’s perfect truthfulness that makes him appear worse to you than men who are timeservers. Too many time-servers rot the State, Mr. Austin said. Nevil is not one of them. I am not able to judge or speculate whether he has a great brain or is likely to distinguish himself out of his profession: I would rather he did not abandon it: but Mr. Austin said to me in talking of him...”
“That notion of Austin’s of screwing women’s minds up to the pitch of men’s!” interjected the colonel with a despairing flap of his arm.