appealed to reason in them; he would not hear of
convictions. He quoted the Bevisham doctor!

'Convictions are generally first impressions that are sealed with later
prejudices,' and insisted there was wisdom in it. Nothing tired him, as
he had said, and addressing woman or man, no prospect of fatigue or of
hopeless effort daunted him in the endeavour to correct an error of
judgement in politics--his notion of an error. The value he put upon
speaking, urging his views, was really fanatical. It appeared that he
canvassed the borough from early morning till near midnight, and nothing
would persuade him that his chance was poor; nothing that an entrenched
Tory like her father, was not to be won even by an assault of all the
reserve forces of Radical pathos, prognostication, and statistics.

Only conceive Nevil Beauchamp knocking at doors late at night, the sturdy
beggar of a vote! or waylaying workmen, as he confessed without shame
that he had done, on their way trooping to their midday meal; penetrating
malodoriferous rooms of dismal ten-pound cottagers, to exhort bedraggled
mothers and babes, and besotted husbands; and exposed to rebuffs from
impertinent tradesmen; and lampooned and travestied, shouting speeches to
roaring men, pushed from shoulder to shoulder of the mob! . . .

Cecilia dropped a curtain on her mind's picture of him. But the blinding
curtain rekindled the thought that the line he had taken could not but be
the desperation of a lover abandoned. She feared it was, she feared it
was not. Nevil Beauchamp's foe persisted in fearing that it was not; his
friend feared that it was. Yet why? For if it was, then he could not be
quite in earnest, and might be cured. Nay, but earnestness works out its
own cure more surely than frenzy, and it should be preferable to think
him sound of heart, sincere though mistaken. Cecilia could not decide
upon what she dared wish for his health's good. Friend and foe were not
further separable within her bosom than one tick from another of a clock;
they changed places, and next his friend was fearing what his foe had
feared: they were inextricable.

Why had he not sprung up on a radiant aquiline ambition, whither one
might have followed him, with eyes and prayers for him, if it was not
possible to do so companionably? At present, in the shape of a canvassing
candidate, it was hardly honourable to let imagination dwell on him, save
compassionately.

When he rose to take his leav