John, as it happened, had not so grave a respect for the sex as for the individual Jane.  He thought women capable of acts of foolishness; his bright-faced sister he could thoroughly trust for prudent conduct.  He gave her a good portion of his heart in confidence, and all of it in affection.  There were matters which he excluded from confidence, even from intimate communication with himself.  These he could not reveal; nor could she perfectly open her heart to him, for the same reason.  They both had an established ideal of their personal qualities, not far above the positive, since they were neither of them pretentious, yet it was a trifle higher and fairer than the working pattern; and albeit they were sincere enough, quite sincere in their mutual intercourse, they had, by what each knew at times of the thumping organ within them, cause for doubting that they were as transparent as the other supposed; and they were separately aware of an inward smile at one another’s partial deception; which did not thwart their honest power of working up to the respected ideal.  The stroke of the deeper self-knowledge rarely shook them; they were able to live with full sensations in the animated picture they were to the eyes best loved by them.  This in fact was their life.  Anything beside it was a dream, and we do not speak of our dreams—­not of every dream.  Especially do we reserve our speech concerning the dream in which we had a revelation of the proud frame deprived of a guiding will, flung rudderless on the waves.  Ah that abject!  The dismantled ship has the grandeur of the tempest about it, but the soul swayed by passion is ignominiously bare-poled, detected, hooted by its old assumption.  If instinct plays fantastical tricks when we are sleeping, let it be ever behind a curtain.  We can be held guilty only if we court exposure.  The ideal of English gentleman and gentlewoman is closely Roman in the self-repression it exacts, and that it should be but occasionally difficult to them shows an affinity with the type.  Do you perchance, O continental observers of the race, call it hypocritical?  It is their nature disciplined to the regimental step of civilisation.  Socially these island men and women of a certain middle rank are veterans of an army, and some of the latest enrolled are the stoutest defenders of the flag.

Brother and sister preserved their little secrets of character apart.  They could not be expected to unfold what they declined personally to examine.  But they were not so successful with the lady governing the household, their widowed maternal aunt, Mrs. Lackstraw, a woman of decisive penetration, and an insubordinate recruit of the army aforesaid.  To her they were without a mask; John was passion’s slave, Jane the most romantic of Eve’s daughters.  She pointed to incidents of their youth; her vision was acutely retrospective.  The wealth of her nephew and niece caused such a view of them to be, as she remarked, anxious past endurance.  She