consider
other people as much as possible from their own point of view. He did
not see, looking at the circumstances, how Wodehouse _could_ be guilty;
and the Curate would not permit the strong instinctive certainty that he
_was_ guilty, to move his own mind from what he imagined to be its
better judgment. He was thinking it over very gloomily when his
breakfast was brought to him and his letters, feeling that he could be
sure of nobody in such an emergency, and dreading more the doubt of his
friends than the clamour of the general world. He could bear (he
imagined) to be hooted at in the streets, if it ever came to that; but
to see the faces of those who loved him troubled with a torturing doubt
of his truth was a terrible thought to the Perpetual Curate. And Lucy?
But here the young man got up indignant and threw off his fears. He
doubted her regard with a doubt which threw darkness over the whole
universe; but that she should be able for a moment to doubt his entire
devotion to her, seemed a blindness incredible. No; let who would
believe ill of him in this respect, to Lucy such an accusation must look
as monstrous as it was untrue. _She_, at least, knew otherwise; and,
taking this false comfort to his heart, Mr Wentworth took up his
letters, and presently was deep in the anxieties of his brother Gerald,
who wrote to him as to a man at leisure, and without any overwhelming
perplexities of his own. It requires a very high amount of unselfishness
in the person thus addressed to prevent a degree of irritation which is
much opposed to sympathy; and Mr Wentworth, though he was very impartial
and reasonable, was not, being still young and meaning to be happy,
unselfish to any inhuman degree. He put down Gerald's letter, after he
had read through half of it, with an exclamation of impatience which he
could not restrain, and then poured out his coffee, which had got cold
in the mean time, and gulped it down with a sense of half-comforting
disgust--for there are moments when the mortification of the flesh
is a relief to the spirit; and then it occurred to him to remember
Wodehouse's tray, which was a kind of love-offering to the shabby
vagabond, and the perfect good order in which _he_ had his breakfast;
and Mr Wentworth laughed at himself with a whimsical perception of all
that was absurd in his own position which did him good, and broke the
spell of his solitary musings. When he took up Gerald's letter again, he
read it thr