solicitation,
that dreadful and direct appeal to my compassion, that placing of my feeble
girlhood in the seat of the arbiter of my aged uncle's hope or despair,
been long persisted in, my resistance might have been worn out--who can
tell?--and I self-sacrificed! Just as criminals in Germany are teased, and
watched, and cross-examined, year after year, incessantly, into a sort of
madness; and worn out with the suspense, the iteration, the self-restraint,
and insupportable fatigue, they at last cut all short, accuse themselves,
and go infinitely relieved to the scaffold--you may guess, then, for me,
nervous, self-diffident, and alone, how intense was the comfort of knowing
that Dudley was actually married, and the harrowing importunity which had
just commenced for ever silenced.

That night I saw my uncle. I pitied him, though I feared him. I was longing
to tell him how anxious I was to help him, if only he could point out the
way. It was in substance what I had already said, but now strongly urged.
He brightened; he sat up perpendicularly in his chair with a countenance,
not weak or fatuous now, but resolute and searching, and which contracted
into dark thought or calculation as I talked.

I dare say I spoke confusedly enough. I was always nervous in his presence;
there was, I fancy, something mesmeric in the odd sort of influence which,
without effort, he exercised over my imagination.

Sometimes this grew into a dismal panic, and Uncle Silas--polished,
mild--seemed unaccountably horrible to me. Then it was no longer an
accidental fascination of electro-biology. It was something more. His
nature was incomprehensible by me. He was without the nobleness, without
the freshness, without the softness, without the frivolities of such human
nature as I had experienced, either within myself or in other persons. I
instinctively felt that appeals to sympathies or feelings could no
more affect him than a marble monument. He seemed to accommodate his
conversation to the moral structure of others, just as spirits are said to
assume the shape of mortals. There were the sensualities of the gourmet for
his body, and there ended his human nature, as it seemed to me. Through
that semi-transparent structure I thought I could now and then discern the
light or the glare of his inner life. But I understood it not.

He never scoffed at what was good or noble--his hardest critic could not
nail him to one such sentence; and yet, it seemed s