finer, much finer, than you could be prepared to meet with;
than you could believe inherent in him, even after years of acquaintance.
Indeed, till some over-sharp contact with his nerves had betrayed, by its
effects, their acute sensibility, this elaborate construction must be ignored;
and the more especially because the sympathetic faculty was not prominent in
him: to feel, and to seize quickly another's feelings, are separate properties;
a few constructions possess both, some neither. Dr. John had the one gift in
exquisite perfection; and because I have admitted that he was not endowed with
the other in equal degree, the reader will considerately refrain from passing to
an extreme, and pronouncing him un-sympathizing, unfeeling: on the contrary, he
was a kind, generous man. Make your need known, his hand was open. Put your
grief into words, he turned no deaf ear. Expect refinements of perception,
miracles of intuition, and realize disappointment. This night, when Dr. John
entered the room, and met the evening lamp, I saw well and at one glance his
whole mechanism.
    To one who had named him slave, and, on any point, banned him from respect,
he must now have peculiar feelings. That the epithet was well applied, and the
ban just, might be; he put forth no denial that it was so: his mind even
candidly revolved that unmanning possibility. He sought in this accusation the
cause of that ill-success which had got so galling a hold on his mental peace.
Amid the worry of a self-condemnatory soliloquy, his demeanour seemed grave,
perhaps cold, both to me and his mother. And yet there was no bad feeling, no
malice, no rancour, no littleness in his countenance, beautiful with a man's
best beauty, even in its depression. When I placed his chair at the table, which
I hastened to do, anticipating the servant, and when I handed him his tea, which
I did with trembling care, he said -
    »Thank you, Lucy,« in as kindly a tone of his full pleasant voice as ever my
ear welcomed.
    For my part, there was only one plan to be pursued; I must expiate my
culpable vehemence, or I must not sleep that night. This would not do at all; I
could not stand it: I made no pretence of capacity to wage war on this footing.
School solitude, conventual silence and stagnation, anything seemed preferable
to living embroiled with Dr. John. As to Ginevra, she