Cecily,
that it was illuminated by many trifles, nuances of feeling and
expression, which he had noticed in his talks with her whenever they had
skirted the subject of her adoption by her mother. He knew her, he was
longing to say, better than I did; when it would have been natural to
reply that one could not hope to compete in such a direction with an
intelligent young man, and we should at once have been upon delicate and
difficult ground. So it was as well perhaps that he kept silence until
he said, as he had come prepared to say, 'Well, I want to put that
beyond a doubt--her happiness--if I'm good enough. I want her, please,
and I only hope that she will be half as willing to come as you are
likely to be to let her go.'

It was a shock when it came, plump, like that; and I was horrified to
feel how completely every other consideration was lost for the instant
in the immense relief that it prefigured. To be my whole complete self
again, without the feeling that a fraction of me was masquerading about
in Cecily! To be freed at once, or almost, from an exacting condition
and an impossible ideal! 'Oh!' I exclaimed, and my eyes positively
filled. 'You ARE good, Dacres, but I couldn't let you do that.'

His undisguised stare brought me back to a sense of the proportion of
things. I saw that in the combination of influences that had brought Mr.
Tottenham to the point of proposing to marry my daughter consideration
for me, if it had a place, would be fantastic. Inwardly I laughed at the
egotism of raw nerves that had conjured it up, even for an instant, as
a reason for gratitude. The situation was not so peculiar, not so
interesting, as that. But I answered his stare with a smile; what I had
said might very well stand.

'Do you imagine,' he said, seeing that I did not mean to amplify it,
'that I want to marry her out of any sort of GOODness?'

'Benevolence is your weakness, Dacres.'

'I see. You think one's motive is to withdraw her from a relation
which ought to be the most natural in the world, but which is, in her
particular and painful case, the most equivocal.'

'Well, come,' I remonstrated. 'You have dropped one or two things, you
know, in the heat of your indignation, not badly calculated to give one
that idea. The eloquent statement you have just made, for instance--it
carries all the patness of old conviction. How often have you rehearsed
it?'

I am a fairly long-suffering person, but I began to feel a litt