 Now, when the pain is gone, I more than forgive: I feel grateful,
as to a sincere well-wisher.«
    »I am your sincere well-wisher: you are right.«
    Thus our quarrel ended.
    Reader, if in the course of this work, you find that my opinion of Dr. John,
undergoes modification, excuse the seeming inconsistency. I give the feeling as
at the time I felt it; I describe the view of character as it appeared when
discovered.
    He showed the fineness of his nature by being kinder to me after that
misunderstanding than before. Nay, the very incident which, by my theory, must
in some degree estrange me and him, changed, indeed, somewhat our relations; but
not in the sense I painfully anticipated. An invisible, but a cold something,
very slight, very transparent, but very chill: a sort of screen of ice had
hitherto, all through our two lives, glazed the medium through which we
exchanged intercourse. Those few warm words, though only warm with anger,
breathed on that frail frost-work of reserve; about this time, it gave note of
dissolution. I think from that day, so long as we continued friends, he never in
discourse stood on topics of ceremony with me. He seemed to know that if he
would but talk about himself, and about that in which he was most interested, my
expectation would always be answered, my wish always satisfied. It follows, as a
matter of course, that I continued to hear much of Ginevra.
    »Ginevra!« He thought her so fair, so good; he spoke so lovingly of her
charms, her sweetness, her innocence, that, in spite of my plain prose knowledge
of the reality, a kind of reflected glow began to settle on her idea, even for
me. Still, reader, I am free to confess, that he often talked nonsense; but I
strove to be unfailingly patient with him. I had had my lesson: I had learned
how severe for me was the pain of crossing, or grieving, or disappointing him.
In a strange and new sense, I grew most selfish, and quite powerless to deny
myself the delight of indulging his mood, and being pliant to his will. He still
seemed to me most absurd when he obstinately doubted, and desponded about his
power to win in the end Miss Fanshawe's preference. The fancy became rooted in
my own mind more stubbornly than ever, that she was only coquetting to goad him,
and that, at heart, she
