rse: so he kept the door
of it locked, admitting sadly in his meditation that there was such
a place, and saying all the while: "If I were not poor!" He saw her
running into the shelter of egregious sophisms, till it became an effort
to him to preserve his reverence for her and the sex she represented.
Finally he imagined that he perceived an idea coming to growth in her,
no other than this: "That in duty to her father she might sacrifice
herself, though still loving him to whom she had given her heart; thus
ennobling her love for father and for lover." With a wicked ingenuity
he tracked her forming notions, encouraged them on, and provoked her
enthusiasm by putting an ironical question: "Whether the character of
the soul was subdued and shaped by the endurance and the destiny of the
perishable?"

"Oh! no, no!" she exclaimed. "It cannot be, or what comfort should we
have?"

Few men knew better that when lovers' sentiments stray away from
feeling, they are to be suspected of a disloyalty. Yet he admired the
tone she took. He had got an 'ideal' of her which it was pleasanter to
magnify than to distort. An 'ideal' is so arbitrary, that if you only
doubt of its being perfection, it will vanish and never come again.
Sir Purcell refused to doubt. He blamed himself for having thought it
possible to doubt, and this, when all the time he knew.

Through endless labyrinths of delusion these two unhappy creatures might
be traced, were it profitable. Down what a vale of little intricate
follies should we be going, lighted by one ghastly conclusion! At times,
struggling from the midst of her sophisms, Cornelia prayed her lover
would claim her openly, and so nerve her to a pitch of energy that
would clinch the ruinous debate. Forgetting that she was an 'ideal'--the
accredited mistress of pure wisdom and of the power of deciding
rightly--she prayed to be dealt with as a thoughtless person, and one of
the herd of women. She felt that Sir Purcell threw too much on her. He
expected her to go calmly to her father, and to Sir Twickenham, and tell
them individually that her heart was engaged; then with a stately figure
to turn, quit the house, and lay her hand in his. He made no allowance
for the weakness of her sex, for the difficulties surrounding her, for
the consideration due to Sir Twickenham's pride, and to her father's
ill-health. She half-protested to herself that he expected from her the
mechanical correctness of a machine, and o