to forestall even by an
hour, or a word, that stringency of the legal obligation from which
there _is_ in a certain sense no redemption. Tie up your drinker under
the pour of his nine gallons, and in two minutes he will moan and
writhe (as you perfectly know) like a Brinvilliers under the
water-torture. That he _asked_ to be tied up, was unwise on his own
principle of loving ale. And _you_ sha'n't be 'chained' up, if you
were to ask twenty times: if you have found truth or not in the
water-well.

You do not see aright what I meant to tell you on another subject. If
he was displeased, (and it was expressed by a shadow a mere negation
of pleasure) it was not with you as a visitor and my friend. You must
not fancy such a thing. It was a sort of instinctive indisposition
towards seeing you here--unexplained to himself, I have no doubt--of
course unexplained, or he would have desired me to receive you never
again, _that_ would have been done at once and unscrupulously. But
without defining his own feeling, he rather disliked seeing you
here--it just touched one of his vibratory wires, brushed by and
touched it--oh, we understand in this house. He is not a nice
observer, but, at intervals very wide, he is subject to
lightnings--call them fancies, sometimes right, sometimes wrong.
Certainly it was not in the character of a 'sympathising friend' that
you made him a very little cross on Monday. And yet you never were nor
will be in danger of being _thanked_, he would not think of it. For
the reserve, the apprehension--dreadful those things are, and
desecrating to one's own nature--but we did not make this position, we
only endure it. The root of the evil is the miserable misconception of
the limits and character of parental rights--it is a mistake of the
intellect rather than of the heart. Then, after using one's children
as one's chattels for a time, the children drop lower and lower toward
the level of the chattels, and the duties of human sympathy to them
become difficult in proportion. And (it seems strange to say it, yet
it is true) _love_, he does not conceive of at all. He has feeling, he
can be moved deeply, he is capable of affection in a peculiar way, but
_that_, he does not understand, any more than he understands Chaldee,
respecting it less of course.

And you fancy that I could propose Italy again? after saying too that
I never would? Oh no, no--yet there is time to think of this, a
superfluity of time, ... 'time