We are not bound to accept more
than we choose from them. Thus we obtain delicacy; and thus, as you will
perceive, our civilization, by the aid of the sentimentalists, has
achieved an effective varnish. There, certainly, to the vulgar, mind a
tail is visible. The outrageous philosopher declares vehemently that no
beast of the field or the forest would own such a tail. (His meaning is,
that he discerns the sign of the animal slinking under the garb of the
stately polished creature. I have all the difficulty in the world to keep
him back and let me pursue my course.) These philosophers are a
bad-mannered body. Either in opposition, or in the support of them, I
maintain simply that the blinking sentimentalist helps to make
civilization what it is, and civilization has a great deal of merit.

"Did you not leave your parasol behind you at Ipley?" said Adela, as she
met Cornelia in the afternoon.

Cornelia coloured. Her pride supported her, and she violated fine shades
painfully in her response: "Mr. Barrett left me there. Is that your
meaning?"

Adela was too much shocked to note the courageousness of the reply.
"Well! if all we do is to come into broad daylight!" was her horrified
mental ejaculation.

The veil of life was about to be lifted for these ladies. They found
Arabella in her room, crying like an unchastened school-girl; and their
first idea was one of intense condemnation--fresh offences on the part of
Mrs. Chump being conjectured. Little by little Arabella sobbed out what
she had heard that day from Mr. Powys.

After the first stupor Adela proposed to go to her father instantly, and
then suggested that they should all go. She continued talking in random
suggestions, and with singular heat, as if she conceived that the
sensibility of her sisters required to be aroused. By moving and acting,
it seemed to her that the prospect of a vast misery might be expunged,
and that she might escape from showing any likeness to Arabella's
shamefully-discoloured face. It was impossible for her to realize grief
in her own bosom. She walked the room in a nervous tremour, shedding a
note of sympathy to one sister and to the other. At last Arabella got
fuller command of her voice. When she had related that her father's
positive wish, furthered by the doctor's special injunction to obey it
scrupulously, was that they were not to go to him in London, and not to
breathe a word of his illness, but to remain at Brookfield entertain