Laetitia’s bosom rose:  her hand was detained:  a lady who has yielded it cannot wrestle to have it back; those outworks which protect her treacherously shelter the enemy aiming at the citadel when he has taken them.  In return for the silken armour bestowed on her by our civilization, it is exacted that she be soft and civil nigh up to perishing-point.  She breathed tremulously high, saying on her top-breath:  “If it—­it may not be so; it can scarcely. . .”  A deep sigh intervened.  It saddened her that she knew so much.

“For when I love I love,” said Sir Willoughby; “my friends and my servants know that.  There can be no medium:  not with me.  I give all, I claim all.  As I am absorbed, so must I absorb.  We both cancel and create, we extinguish and we illumine one another.  The error may be in the choice of an object:  it is not in the passion.  Perfect confidence, perfect abandonment.  I repeat, I claim it because I give it.  The selfishness of love may be denounced:  it is a part of us.  My answer would be, it is an element only of the noblest of us!  Love, Laetitia!  I speak of love.  But one who breaks faith to drag us through the mire, who betrays, betrays and hands us over to the world, whose prey we become identically because of virtues we were educated to think it a blessing to possess:  tell me the name for that!—­Again, it has ever been a principle with me to respect the sex.  But if we see women false, treacherous . . .  Why indulge in these abstract views, you would ask!  The world presses them on us, full as it is of the vilest specimens.  They seek to pluck up every rooted principle:  they sneer at our worship:  they rob us of our religion.  This bitter experience of the world drives us back to the antidote of what we knew before we plunged into it:  of one . . . of something we esteemed and still esteem.  Is that antidote strong enough to expel the poison?  I hope so!  I believe so!  To lose faith in womankind is terrible.”

He studied her.  She looked distressed:  she was not moved.

She was thinking that, with the exception of a strain of haughtiness, he talked excellently to men, at least in the tone of the things he meant to say; but that his manner of talking to women went to an excess in the artificial tongue—­the tutored tongue of sentimental deference of the towering male:  he fluted exceedingly; and she wondered whether it was this which had wrecked him with Miss Middleton.

His intuitive sagacity counselled him to strive for pathos to move her.  It was a task; for while he perceived her to be not ignorant of his plight, he doubted her knowing the extent of it, and as his desire was merely to move her without an exposure of himself, he had to compass being pathetic as it were under the impediments of a mailed and gauntletted knight, who cannot easily heave the bosom, or show it heaving.

Moreover, pathos is a tide:  often it carries the awakener of it off his feet, and whirls him over and over armour and all in ignominious attitudes of helpless prostration, whereof he may well be ashamed in the retrospect.  We cannot quite preserve our dignity when we stoop to the work of calling forth tears.  Moses had probably to take a nimble jump away from the rock after that venerable Law-giver had knocked the water out of it.