g Grandcourt, and she wished to accept him if
she could. At this moment she would willingly have had weights hung on
her own caprice.

Mr. Gascoigne did hear--not Gwendolen's answers repeated verbatim, but
a softened generalized account of them. The mother conveyed as vaguely
as the keen rector's questions would let her the impression that
Gwendolen was in some uncertainty about her own mind, but inclined on
the whole to acceptance. The result was that the uncle felt himself
called on to interfere; he did not conceive that he should do his duty
in witholding direction from his niece in a momentous crisis of this
kind. Mrs. Davilow ventured a hesitating opinion that perhaps it would
be safer to say nothing--Gwendolen was so sensitive (she did not like
to say willful). But the rector's was a firm mind, grasping its first
judgments tenaciously and acting on them promptly, whence
counter-judgments were no more for him than shadows fleeting across the
solid ground to which he adjusted himself.

This match with Grandcourt presented itself to him as a sort of public
affair; perhaps there were ways in which it might even strengthen the
establishment. To the rector, whose father (nobody would have suspected
it, and nobody was told) had risen to be a provincial corn-dealer,
aristocratic heirship resembled regal heirship in excepting its
possessor from the ordinary standard of moral judgments, Grandcourt,
the almost certain baronet, the probable peer, was to be ranged with
public personages, and was a match to be accepted on broad general
grounds national and ecclesiastical. Such public personages, it is
true, are often in the nature of giants which an ancient community may
have felt pride and safety in possessing, though, regarded privately,
these born eminences must often have been inconvenient and even
noisome. But of the future husband personally Mr. Gascoigne was
disposed to think the best. Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from
the dirty tobacco-pipes of of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing
but the bad taste of the smoker. But if Grandcourt had really made any
deeper or more unfortunate experiments in folly than were common in
young men of high prospects, he was of an age to have finished them.
All accounts can be suitably wound up when a man has not ruined
himself, and the expense may be taken as an insurance against future
error. This was the view of practical wisdom; with reference to higher
views, repentance h