unmatched
generosity within a limit, its devotion to the family, and its family
eye for the country. An immediate introduction to Ottilia would have won
him to enjoy the idea of his grandson's marriage; but not having seen
her, he could not realize her dignity, nor even the womanliness of a
'foreign woman.'

'Thank God for one thing,' he said: 'we shan't have that fellow
bothering--shan't have the other half of your family messing the
business. You'll have to account for him to your wife as you best can.
I 've nothing to do with him, mind that. He came to my house, stole my
daughter, crazed her wits, dragged us all...'

The excuse to turn away from the hearing of abuse of my father was too
good to be neglected, though it was horribly humiliating that I should
have to take advantage of it--vexatious that I should seem chargeable
with tacit lying in allowing the squire to suppose the man he hated
to be a stranger to the princess. Not feeling sure whether it might be
common prudence to delude him even passively, I thought of asking Janet
for her opinion, but refrained. A stout deceiver has his merits, but a
feeble hypocrite applying to friends to fortify him in his shifts
and tergiversations must provoke contempt. I desired that Janet might
continue to think well of me. I was beginning to drop in my own esteem,
which was the mirror of my conception of Ottilia's view of her lover.

Now, had I consulted Janet, I believe the course of my history would
have been different, for she would not then, I may imagine, have been
guilty of her fatal slip of the tongue that threw us into heavy seas
when we thought ourselves floating on canal waters. A canal barge (an
image to me of the most perfect attainable peace), suddenly, on its
passage through our long fir-woods, with their scented reeds and flowing
rushes, wild balsam and silky cotton-grass beds, sluiced out to sea and
storm, would be somewhat in my likeness soon after a single luckless
observation had passed at our Riversley breakfast-table one Sunday
morning.

My aunt Dorothy and Mr. Peterborough were conversing upon the varieties
of Christian sects, and particularly such as approached nearest
to Anglicanism, together with the strange, saddening fact that the
Christian religion appeared to be more divided than, Peterborough
regretted to say, the forms of idolatry established by the Buddha,
Mahomet, and other impostors. He claimed the audacious merit for us,
that we did not