"Well, you're a strange girl!" said Cornelia, who was a little confused. "I don't see how you can ever be either happy or unhappy. Nothing human seems to have any hold upon you."
"I'm very human," returned Sophie, shaking her head. "There are some things, I think, would soon drive me out of the world, if God wore to send them to me."
The idea of death, when brought home to Cornelia, never failed to affect her. If she had been planning the destruction of an enemy, she would have wept bitterly at the sight of that enemy's dead body; nay, even at a vivid account of his death. Sophie's words brought tears to her eyes at once, and a quaver into her voice.
"Don't—please don't talk that way, dear; it isn't so easy to die as you think, I'm sure. The idea of dying because anybody was wicked! It's only because you've been ill, and have got into the habit of expecting to die, that you have such ideas—isn't it? don't you think so? You'll stop feeling so as soon as you're well again—won't you?"
"Perhaps," said Sophie, with, it may be, a particle of satire in her smile.
They now got up from the rock and began to descend toward the Parsonage. Sophie stepped with a quick but careful precision, never slipping or missing her footing. Cornelia made short rushes, and daring jumps, often coining near to fall. Her mind was a Babel of new thoughts; or rather one idea spoke with many tongues, and made much disturbance.
The greatest crimes are often perpetrated by those who, in their own phrase, follow the lead of the moment, and let things take their course. Things never take their own course, in a certain sense; what we do, and say, and think, creates circumstances and shapes results. There seems always to be a choice of paths. We profess—and believe—that we are neutral; that we surrender ourselves to the chance of the current. But let an evil hope—a dangerous wish—once enter our minds: something we venture only half to hint to ourselves in the non-committal whispers of a craven, unacknowledged longing-working secretly within us, it will act upon our course as a rudder, which, hidden beneath the water, steers the vessel inevitably toward a certain goal. Perhaps, when the current has become too swift, and the rudder, clamped in one fatal position, cannot be turned, we may realize, and recoil; but now, indeed, we follow the lead of the moment; now, beyond a doubt, we let things take their course: we are hurried on irresistibly; that which we dared not openly to name, or fairly to face, now looms awfully above us—an irrevocable, accomplished fact.
Beyond doubt it would have been safer to have steadily and fearlessly kept the end in view from the outset: for the full horror of it would have been visible while yet there was time to change our minds. Few people have the nerve to jump from a precipice, or stand in way of a railway-engine, without first shutting their eyes, and perhaps their ears also.
In Cornelia's mind there was no intention of ruining her sister's happiness by interfering between her and Bressant; but then she did not think it likely that to lose him would occasion Sophie any thing more than a temporary and comparatively trifling degree of suffering. If she could allow her love for him to depend upon the immaculateness of his moral character, she did not love him as much as Cornelia, to whose affection any considerations of that kind were immaterial. What, after all, was Sophie's love but an idealization, which had, to be sure, taken Bressant as its object, but which placed no vital dependence upon him? But Cornelia's love was to her a matter of life and death: she was quite convinced that to live without Bressant would be an impossibility.
The next question was, whether Bressant was really as good as Sophie believed him to be. Cornelia did not think he was. Perhaps a secret sense of his attitude toward her suggested her suspicions; perhaps they were the result of her New-York experience, which had taught her just enough about men to make her imagine there was more or less of dark and indefinite villainy in the composition of all of them; perhaps it was her wish that fathered her moral misgivings about him—for it must be confessed that Cornelia was very far from shrinking at the idea of seeing her suspicions verified.