as was Sir Twickenham's mind, she could not
but acknowledge that he had behaved with an extraordinary courtesy,
amounting to chivalry, in his suit. On two occasions he had declined to
let her be pressed to decide. He came to the house, and went, like an
ordinary visitor. She was indebted to him for that splendid luxury of
indecision, which so few of the maids of earth enjoy for a lengthened
term. The rude shakings given her by Sir Purcell, at a time when she
needed all her power of dreaming, to support the horror of accumulated
facts, was almost resented. "He as much as says he doubts me, when
this is what I endure!" she cried to herself, as Mrs. Chump ordered her
champagne-glass to be filled, with "Now, Cornelia, my dear; if it's bad
luck we're in for, there's nothin' cheats ut like champagne," and she
had to put the (to her) nauseous bubbles to her lips. Sir Purcell had
not been told of her tribulations, and he had not expressed any doubt
of her truth; but sentimentalists can read one another with peculiar
accuracy through their bewitching gauzes. She read his unwritten doubt,
and therefore expected her unwritten misery to be read.

So it is when you play at Life! When you will not go straight, you get
into this twisting maze. Now he wrote coldly, and she had to repress a
feeling of resentment at that also. She ascribed the changes of his
tone fundamentally to want of faith in her, and absolutely, during the
struggle she underwent, she by this means somehow strengthened her idea
of her own faithfulness. She would have phrased her projected line of
conduct thus: "I owe every appearance of assent to my poor father's
scheme, that will spare his health. I owe him everything, save the
positive sacrifice of my hand." In fact, she meant to do her duty to
her father up to the last moment, and then, on the extreme verge, to
remember her duty to her lover. But she could not write it down, and
tell her lover as much. She knew instinctively that, facing the eyes,
it would not look well. Perhaps, at another season, she would have acted
and thought with less folly; but the dull pain of her great uncertainty,
and the little stinging whips daily applied to her, exaggerated her
tendency to self-deception. "Who has ever had to bear so much?--what
slave?" she would exclaim, as a refuge from the edge of his veiled
irony. For a slave has, if not selection of what he will eat and drink,
the option of rejecting what is distasteful. Cornelia