direct
entreaties. She related the whole story of Renée in England, and appeared
distressed with a desperate wonderment at Cecilia's mildness after hearing it.
Her hearer would have imagined that she had no moral sense, if it had not been
so perceptible that the poor lady's mind was distempered on the one subject of
Nevil Beauchamp. Cecilia's high conception of duty, wherein she was a peerless
flower of our English civilization, was incommunicable: she could practise, not
explain it. She bowed to Lady Romfrey's praises of Nevil, suffered her hands to
be wrung, her heart to be touched, all but an avowal of her love of him to be
wrested from her, and not the less did she retain her cold resolution to marry
to please her father and fulfil her pledge. In truth, it was too late to speak
of Renée to her now. It did not beseem Cecilia to remember that she had ever
been a victim of jealousy; and while confessing to many errors, because she felt
them, and gained a necessary strength from them - in the comfort of the
consciousness of pain, for example, which she sorely needed, that the pain in
her own breast might deaden her to Nevil's, - jealousy, the meanest of the
errors of a lofty soul, yielded no extract beyond the bare humiliation proper to
an acknowledgement that it had existed: so she discarded the recollection of the
passion which had wrought the mischief. Since we cannot have a peerless flower
of civilization without artificial aid, it may be understood how it was that
Cecilia could extinguish some lights in her mind and kindle others, and
wherefore what it was not natural for her to do, she did. She had, briefly, a
certain control of herself.
    Our common readings in the fictitious romances which mark out a plot and
measure their characters to fit into it, had made Rosamund hopeful of the effect
of that story of Renée. A wooden young woman, or a galvanized (sweet to the
writer, either of them, as to the reader - so moveable they are!) would have
seen her business at this point, and have glided melting to reconciliation and
the chamber where romantic fiction ends joyously. Rosamund had counted on it.
    She looked intently at Cecilia. »He is ruined, wasted, ill, unloved; he has
lost you - I am the cause!« she cried in a convulsion of grief.
    »Dear Lady Romfrey!« Cecilia would have consoled her. »There is nothing to
lead us to suppose that Nevil is unwell, and you are not