e it seemed utterly righteous,
and because, too, it had, under heavy penalties, to be utterly concealed
beneath a courteous and genial manner: till many a time he felt inclined
to knock Elsley down for little roughnesses to her, which were really
the fruit of mere _gaucherie_; and then accused himself for a hypocrite,
because he was keeping up the courtesies of life with such a man. For
Campbell, like most men of his temperament, was over-stern, and
sometimes a little cruel and unjust, in demanding of others the same
lofty code which he had laid down for himself, and in demanding it, too,
of some more than of others, by a very questionable exercise of private
judgment. On the whole, he was right, no doubt, in being as indulgent as
he dared to the publicans and sinners like Scoutbush; and in being as
severe as he dared on all Pharisees, and pretentious persons whatsoever:
but he was too much inclined to draw between the two classes one of
those strong lines of demarcation which exist only in the fancies of the
human brain; for sins, like all diseased matters, are complicated and
confused matters; many a seeming Pharisee is at heart a self-condemned
publican, and ought to be comforted, and not cursed; while many a
publican is, in the midst of all his foul sins, a thorough exclusive and
self-complacent Pharisee, and needs not the right hand of mercy, but the
strong arm of punishment.

Campbell, like other men, had his faults: and his were those of a man
wrapped up in a pure and stately, but an austere and lonely creed,
distrusted with the world in all its forms, and looking down upon men in
general nearly as much as Thurnall did. So he set down Elsley for a bad
man, to whom he was forced by hard circumstances to behave as if he were
a good one.

The only way, therefore, in which he could vent his feeling, was by
showing to Lucia that studied attention which sympathy and chivalry
demand of a man toward an injured woman. Not that he dared, or wished,
to conduct himself with her as he did with Valencia, even had she not
been a married woman; he did not know her as intimately as he did her
sister; but still he had a right to behave as the most intimate friend
of her family, and he asserted that right; and all the more determinedly
because Elsley seemed now and then not to like it. "I will teach him how
to behave to a charming woman," said he to himself; and perhaps he had
been wiser if he had not said it: but every man has hi