'And you will really love her?'
'I ought to be a hearty lover,' said Philip, with a slight smile, 'for I am a hearty hater, and proverbially the one qualifies for the other. Love and hatred are the two poles of the magnet; a weakly energized needle that hardly repels at one end, will not vigorously attract at the other.'
'But surely you hate no one!'
'Do I not? I have been driven to the verge of it to-day, by my aunt; but I pardon her because of the consequences that sprang out of her behaviour. She exasperated me to such a degree that I found courage to speak, and but for the stimulus applied to me, might have failed to make a bid for what I have now secured.'
'I am sorry to think that you hate anyone,' said the old lady. 'We cannot command our likes and dislikes, but we can hold hatred in check, which is an unchristian sentiment.'
'Then in hatred I am a heathen. I shall become a good Christian in time under Salome's tuition. I shall place myself unreservedly at her feet as a catechumen.'
'Sometimes,' said Janet, laughing, 'love turns to hate, and hate to love. A bishop's crosier is something like your magnetic needle. At one end is a pastoral crook, and at the other a spike, and in a careless hand the crook that should reclaim the errant lamb may be turned, and the spike transfix it.'
'I can no more conceive of love for Salome altering its quality than I can imagine my detestation—no, I will call it hate, for a certain person becoming converted to love.'
'But whom do you hate—not your aunt?'
'No; the man who ruined my father, made his life a burden to him, turned his heart to wormwood, lost him his brother's love, and his sister's regard—though that latter was no great loss—deprived him of his social position, threw him out of the element in which alone he could breathe, and bade fair to mar my life also.'