Unconsciously Sister Cecilia was doing the very best thing possible for Dora, She was arousing in her the spirit of antagonism—hardening a stricken heart, as it were, by a fresh challenge. She was teaching Dora to fight for what we learn to deem most sacred—namely, the right to monopolise our own thoughts and feelings. Sister Cecilia is not, one may assume, the only good woman in the world who cannot draw a definite line between sympathy and mere curiosity. With many the display of sympathy is nothing but a half-conscious bait to attract a shoal of further details.
Self-reliance was lurking somewhere in this girl's character, but it had never been developed by the pressure of circumstances. Reserve she had seen practised by her father, but the actual advantages thereof were only now beginning to be apparent to her. The body, we are told, adapts itself to abnormal circumstances; so is it with the mind. Already Dora was beginning, as they say at sea, to find her feet; to take that stand amidst her environments which she was forced to hold, practically alone, thereafter.
And Sister Cecilia, with that blind faith in a good motive which gives almost as much trouble as actual vice, floundered on in the path she had mapped out for herself.
“You know, dear,” she said, looking out of the window with a sentimental droop of her thin, inquisitive lips, “I cannot help feeling that this—this terrible blow means more to you than it does to us.”
“Why?” inquired Dora practically.
Sister Cecilia was silent, with one of those aggravating silences which do not allow even the satisfaction of a flat contradiction. A meaning silence is a coward's argument. She was beginning to feel slightly nervous before this child, ignorant that childhood is not always a matter of years and calendar months.
“Why?” asked Dora again.
Sister Cecilia looked rather bewildered.
“Well, dear, I thought perhaps—I always thought that my poor boy entertained some feeling—you understand?”
“No,” replied Dora, borrowing for the moment her father's most crushing deliberation of manner, “I cannot say I do. When you say your 'poor boy,' are you referring to Jem?”