He regretted his inability to add to her knowledge of the Spanish Pyrenees.
Books helped her at present, she said.
Feeling acutely that hostility would have brought them closer than her uninviting civility, he spoke of the assault on Mr. Wythan, and Gower Woodseer’s conjecture, and of his having long since discharged the rascal Ines.
To which her unreproachful answer, ‘You made use of those men, my lord,’ sent a cry ringing through him, recalling Feltre’s words, as to the grip men progressively are held in by their deeds done.
‘Oh, quite true, we change our views and ways of life,’ he said, thinking she might set her considerations on other points of his character. But this reflection was a piece of humility not yet in his particular estimate of his character, and he spurned it: an act of pride that drove his mind, for occupation, to contemplate hers; which speedily became an embrace of her character, until he was asking whether the woman he called wife and dared not clasp was one of those rarest, who can be idealized by virtue of their being known. For the young man embracing a character loses grasp of his own, is plucked out of himself and passes into it, to see the creature he is with the other’s eyes, and feel for the other as a very self. Such is the privilege and the chastisement of the young.
Gower Woodseer’s engagement with the girl Madge was a happier subject for expatiation and agreement. Her deeper tones threw a light on Gower, and where she saw goodness, he could at least behold the natural philosopher practically philosophizing.
‘The girl shall have a dowry from me,’ he said; and the sum named was large. Her head bent acknowledgingly; money had small weight with her now. His perception of it stripped him and lamed him.
He wished her ladyship good-night. She stood up and performed a semi-ceremonious obeisance, neatly adapted to their mutual position. She had a well-bred mother.
Probably she would sleep. No such expectation could soothe the friend, and some might be thinking misleader, of Ambrose Mallard, before he had ocular proof that the body lay underground. His promise was given to follow it to the grave, a grave in consecrated earth. Ambrose died of the accidental shot of a pocket-pistol he customarily carried loaded. Two intimate associates of the dead man swore to that habit of his. They lied to get him undisputed Christian burial. Aha! The earl laughed outright at Chummy Potts’s nursery qualms. The old fellow had to do it, and he lied like a man for the sake of Ambrose Mallard’s family. So much is owing to our friend.
Can ecclesiastical casuists decide upon cases of conscience affecting men of the world?