avoiding her than if she were
in her few senses.

'A woman of honourable feeling, nephew, would be careful to do nothing to
hinder you in your career, as this putting of herself in your way most
certainly will. Yet I hear that she professes a great anxiety on this
same future of yours as a physicist. The best way in which she can show
the reality of her anxiety is by leaving you to yourself.'

Leaving him to himself! She paled again, as if chilled by a conviction
that in this the old man was right.

'She'll blab your most secret plans and theories to every one of her
acquaintance, and make you appear ridiculous by announcing them before
they are matured. If you attempt to study with a woman, you'll be ruled
by her to entertain fancies instead of theories, air-castles instead of
intentions, qualms instead of opinions, sickly prepossessions instead of
reasoned conclusions. . . .

'An experienced woman waking a young man's passions just at a moment when
he is endeavouring to shine intellectually, is doing little less than
committing a crime.'

* * * * *

Thus much the letter; and it was enough for her, indeed. The flushes of
indignation which had passed over her, as she gathered this man's opinion
of herself, combined with flushes of grief and shame when she considered
that Swithin--her dear Swithin--was perfectly acquainted with this
cynical view of her nature; that, reject it as he might, and as he
unquestionably did, such thoughts of her had been implanted in him, and
lay in him. Stifled as they were, they lay in him like seeds too deep
for germination, which accident might some day bring near the surface and
aerate into life.

The humiliation of such a possibility was almost too much to endure; the
mortification--she had known nothing like it till now. But this was not
all. There succeeded a feeling in comparison with which resentment and
mortification were happy moods--a miserable conviction that this old man
who spoke from the grave was not altogether wrong in his speaking; that
he was only half wrong; that he was, perhaps, virtually right. Only
those persons who are by nature affected with that ready esteem for
others' positions which induces an undervaluing of their own, fully
experience the deep smart of such convictions against self--the wish for
annihilation that is engendered in the moment of despair, at feeling that
at length we, our best and firmest friend, cease to believe in our cause.

V