The ladies were at a dead-lock, and that the heart is the father of our histories, I am led to think when I look abroad on families stagnant because of so weak a motion of the heart.  There are those who have none at all; the mass of us are moved from the propulsion of the toes of the Fates.  But the ladies of Brookfield had hearts lively enough to get them into scrapes.  The getting out of them, or getting on at all, was left to Providence.  They were at a dead-lock, for Arabella, flattered as she was by Freshfield Sumner’s wooing, could not openly throw Edward over, whom indeed she thought that she liked the better of the two, though his letters had not so wide an intellectual range.  Her father was irritably anxious that she should close with Edward.  Adela could not move:  at least, not openly.  Cornelia might have taken an initiative; but tenderness for her father’s health had hitherto restrained her, and she temporized with Sir Twickenham on the noblest of principles.  She was, by the devotion of her conduct, enabled to excuse herself so far that she could even fish up an excuse in the shape of the effort she had made to find him entertaining:  as if the said effort should really be re-payment enough to him for his assiduous and most futile suit.  One deep grief sat on Cornelia’s mind.  She had heard from Lady Gosstre that there was something like madness in the Barrett family.  She had consented to meet Sir Purcell clandestinely (after debate on his claim to such a sacrifice on her part), and if, on those occasions, her lover’s tone was raised, it gave her a tremour.  And he had of late appeared to lose his noble calm; he had spoken (it might almost be interpreted) as if he doubted her.  Once, when she had mentioned her care for her father, he had cried out upon the name of father with violence, looking unlike himself.

His condemnation of the world, too, was not so Christian as it had been; it betrayed what the vulgar would call spite, and was not all compassed in his peculiar smooth shrug—­expressive of a sort of border-land between contempt and charity:  which had made him wear in her sight all the superiority which the former implies, with a considerable share of the benign complacency of the latter.  This had gone.  He had been sarcastic even to her; saying once, and harshly:  “Have you a will?” Personally she liked the poor organist better than the poor baronet, though he had less merit.  It was unpleasant in her present mood to be told “that we have come into this life to fashion for ourselves souls;” and that “whosoever cannot decide is a soulless wretch fit but to pass into vapour.”  He appeared to have ceased to make his generous allowances for difficult situations.  A senseless notion struck Cornelia, that with the baronetcy he had perhaps inherited some of the madness of his father.