have ever met, or am ever
likely to meet, who seems to me perfect."

If this was Sybil's teaching, she had made the best of her time.

Carrington's tone and words pierced through all Mrs. Lee's armour as
though they were pointed with the most ingenious cruelty, and designed
to torture her. She felt hard and small before him. Life for life,
his had been, and was now, far less bright than hers, yet he was her
superior. He sat there, a true man, carrying his burden calmly, quietly,
without complaint, ready to face the next shock of life with the same
endurance he had shown against the rest. And he thought her perfect!
She felt humiliated that any brave man should say to her face that he
thought her perfect! She! perfect! In her contrition she was half ready
to go down at his feet and confess her sins; her hysterical dread of
sorrow and suffering, her narrow sympathies, her feeble faith, her
miserable selfishness, her abject cowardice. Every nerve in her body
tingled with shame when she thought what a miserable fraud she was; what
a mass of pretensions unfounded, of deceit ingrained. She was ready to
hide her face in her hands. She was disgusted, outraged with her own
image as she saw it, contrasted with Carrington's single word: Perfect!

Nor was this the worst. Carrington was not the first man who had thought
her perfect. To hear this word suddenly used again, which had never been
uttered to her before except by lips now dead and gone, made her brain
reel. She seemed to hear her husband once more telling her that she was
perfect. Yet against this torture, she had a better defence. She had
long since hardened herself to bear these recollections, and they
steadied and strengthened her.

She had been called perfect before now, and what had come of it? Two
graves, and a broken life! She drew herself up with a face now grown
quite pale and rigid. In reply to Carrington, she said not a word, but
only shook her head slightly without looking at him.

He went on: "After all, it is not my own happiness I am thinking of but
yours. I never was vain enough to think that I was worth your love, or
that I could ever win it. Your happiness is another thing. I care so
much for that as to make me dread going away, for fear that you may
yet find yourself entangled in this wretched political life here, when,
perhaps if I stayed, I might be of some use."

"Do you really think, then, that I am going to fall a victim to Mr.
Ratcliffe?" ask