s
we all have, every one of us, all the children of Adam!) offences
to expiate and peace to make, does not justify the desire to forget.
Therefore I have long dismissed it, and I neither forget nor wish to
forget.'

Mr Flintwinch, who had latterly been shaking the sediment at the bottom
of his tea-cup, round and round, here gulped it down, and putting the
cup in the tea-tray, as done with, turned his eyes upon Mr Blandois as
if to ask him what he thought of that?

'All expressed, madam,' said Mr Blandois, with his smoothest bow and his
white hand on his breast, 'by the word "naturally," which I am proud
to have had sufficient apprehension and appreciation (but without
appreciation I could not be Blandois) to employ.'

'Pardon me, sir,' she returned, 'if I doubt the likelihood of a
gentleman of pleasure, and change, and politeness, accustomed to court
and to be courted--'

'Oh madam! By Heaven!'

'--If I doubt the likelihood of such a character quite comprehending
what belongs to mine in my circumstances. Not to obtrude doctrine upon
you,' she looked at the rigid pile of hard pale books before her, '(for
you go your own way, and the consequences are on your own head), I will
say this much: that I shape my course by pilots, strictly by proved and
tried pilots, under whom I cannot be shipwrecked--can not be--and that
if I were unmindful of the admonition conveyed in those three letters, I
should not be half as chastened as I am.'

It was curious how she seized the occasion to argue with some invisible
opponent. Perhaps with her own better sense, always turning upon herself
and her own deception.

'If I forgot my ignorances in my life of health and freedom, I might
complain of the life to which I am now condemned. I never do; I never
have done. If I forgot that this scene, the Earth, is expressly meant to
be a scene of gloom, and hardship, and dark trial, for the creatures who
are made out of its dust, I might have some tenderness for its vanities.
But I have no such tenderness. If I did not know that we are, every one,
the subject (most justly the subject) of a wrath that must be satisfied,
and against which mere actions are nothing, I might repine at the
difference between me, imprisoned here, and the people who pass that
gateway yonder. But I take it as a grace and favour to be elected to
make the satisfaction I am making here, to know what I know for certain
here, and to work out what I have worked out here. My