to descend toward the Parsonage.
Sophie stepped with a quick but careful precision, never slipping or
missing her footing. Cornelia made short rushes, and daring jumps, often
coining near to fall. Her mind was a Babel of new thoughts; or rather
one idea spoke with many tongues, and made much disturbance.

The greatest crimes are often perpetrated by those who, in their own
phrase, follow the lead of the moment, and let things take their course.
Things never take their own course, in a certain sense; what we do, and
say, and think, creates circumstances and shapes results. There seems
always to be a choice of paths. We profess--and believe--that we are
neutral; that we surrender ourselves to the chance of the current. But
let an evil hope--a dangerous wish--once enter our minds: something we
venture only half to hint to ourselves in the non-committal whispers of
a craven, unacknowledged longing-working secretly within us, it will act
upon our course as a rudder, which, hidden beneath the water, steers the
vessel inevitably toward a certain goal. Perhaps, when the current has
become too swift, and the rudder, clamped in one fatal position, cannot
be turned, we may realize, and recoil; but now, indeed, we follow the
lead of the moment; now, beyond a doubt, we let things take their
course: we are hurried on irresistibly; that which we dared not openly
to name, or fairly to face, now looms awfully above us--an irrevocable,
accomplished fact.

Beyond doubt it would have been safer to have steadily and fearlessly
kept the end in view from the outset: for the full horror of it would
have been visible while yet there was time to change our minds. Few
people have the nerve to jump from a precipice, or stand in way of a
railway-engine, without first shutting their eyes, and perhaps their
ears also.

In Cornelia's mind there was no intention of ruining her sister's
happiness by interfering between her and Bressant; but then she did not
think it likely that to lose him would occasion Sophie any thing more
than a temporary and comparatively trifling degree of suffering. If she
could allow her love for him to depend upon the immaculateness of his
moral character, she did not love him as much as Cornelia, to whose
affection any considerations of that kind were immaterial. What, after
all, was Sophie's love but an idealization, which had, to be sure, taken
Bressant as its object, but which placed no vital dependence upon him?
But Co