Step by step Sir Purcell watched the clouding of her mind with false conceits, and knew it to be owing to the heart’s want of vigour.  Again and again he was tempted to lay an irreverent hand on the veil his lady walked in, and make her bare to herself.  Partly in simple bitterness, he refrained:  but the chief reason was that he had no comfort in giving a shock to his own state of deception.  He would have had to open a dark closet; to disentangle and bring to light what lay in an undistinguishable heap; to disfigure her to herself, and share in her changed eyesight; possibly to be, or seem, coarse:  so he kept the door of it locked, admitting sadly in his meditation that there was such a place, and saying all the while:  “If I were not poor!” He saw her running into the shelter of egregious sophisms, till it became an effort to him to preserve his reverence for her and the sex she represented.  Finally he imagined that he perceived an idea coming to growth in her, no other than this:  “That in duty to her father she might sacrifice herself, though still loving him to whom she had given her heart; thus ennobling her love for father and for lover.”  With a wicked ingenuity he tracked her forming notions, encouraged them on, and provoked her enthusiasm by putting an ironical question:  “Whether the character of the soul was subdued and shaped by the endurance and the destiny of the perishable?”

“Oh! no, no!” she exclaimed.  “It cannot be, or what comfort should we have?”

Few men knew better that when lovers’ sentiments stray away from feeling, they are to be suspected of a disloyalty.  Yet he admired the tone she took.  He had got an ‘ideal’ of her which it was pleasanter to magnify than to distort.  An ‘ideal’ is so arbitrary, that if you only doubt of its being perfection, it will vanish and never come again.  Sir Purcell refused to doubt.  He blamed himself for having thought it possible to doubt, and this, when all the time he knew.

Through endless labyrinths of delusion these two unhappy creatures might be traced, were it profitable.  Down what a vale of little intricate follies should we be going, lighted by one ghastly conclusion!  At times, struggling from the midst of her sophisms, Cornelia prayed her lover would claim her openly, and so nerve her to a pitch of energy that would clinch the ruinous debate.  Forgetting that she was an ’ideal’—­the accredited mistress of pure wisdom and of the power of deciding rightly—­ she prayed to be dealt with as a thoughtless person, and one of the herd of women.  She felt that Sir Purcell threw too much on her.  He expected her to go calmly to her father, and to Sir Twickenham, and tell them individually that her heart was engaged; then with a stately figure to turn, quit the house, and lay her hand in his.  He made no allowance for the weakness of her sex, for the difficulties surrounding her, for the consideration due to Sir Twickenham’s pride, and to her father’s ill-health.  She half-protested to herself that he expected from her the mechanical correctness of a machine, and overlooked the fact that she was human.  It was a grave comment on her ambition to be an ‘ideal.’