The two were in a dramatic tangle of the Nice Feelings worth a glance as we pass on.  She wished to say to him, “You are unjust to my perplexities;” and he to her, “You fail in your dilemma through cowardice.”  Instead of uttering which, they chid themselves severally for entertaining such coarse ideas of their idol.  Doubtless they were silent from consideration for one another:  but I must add, out of extreme tenderness for themselves likewise.  There are people who can keep the facts that front them absent from their contemplation by not framing them in speech; and much benevolence of the passive order may be traced to a disinclination to inflict pain upon oneself.  “My duty to my father,” being cited by Cornelia, Sir Purcell had to contend with it.

“True love excludes no natural duty,” she said.

And he:  “Love discerns unerringly what is and what is not duty.”

“In the case of a father, can there be any doubt?” she asked, the answer shining in her confident aspect.

“There are many things that fathers may demand of us!” he interjected bitterly.

She had a fatal glimpse here of the false light in which his resentment coloured the relations between fathers and children; and, deeming him incapable of conducting this argument, she felt quite safe in her opposition, up to a point where feeling stopped her.

“Devotedness to a father I must conceive to be a child’s first duty,” she said.

Sir Purcell nodded:  “Yes; a child’s!”

“Does not history give the higher praise to children who sacrifice themselves for their parents?” asked Cornelia.

And he replied:  “So, you seek to be fortified in such matters by history!”

Courteous sneers silenced her.  Feeling told her she was in the wrong; but the beauty of her sentiment was not to be contested, and therefore she thought that she might distrust feeling:  and she went against it somewhat; at first very tentatively, for it caused pain.  She marked a line where the light of duty should not encroach on the light of our human desires.  “But love for a parent is not merely duty,” thought Cornelia.  “It is also love;—­and is it not the least selfish love?”

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!”