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"Sir Robert is not a hot-headed youth, full of the fire of a first passion. He wishes an alliance with our house, and he sees that Cecilia, with her four years' seniority, would perchance in the eyes of the world be the more suitable wife; and he admires her beauty, and thinks well of her dutifulness, her steadiness, and her many virtues.
The very virtue that had made her overcruel to him in the past would have made her overkind to him in the future. Unwittingly she had used a phrase startlingly true. She would have worn herself to death in her determination to please. Incidentally she would have driven him mad with conscientious dutifulness. "He would have found no fault with me that I could help," she said.
But had a lay sentiment toward these forces been fostered by clear knowledge of their nature and relation to ourselves, the dutifulness or cosmic emotion thereby aroused would have remained purely moral and historical. As science would not in the end admit any myth which was not avowed poetry, so it would not admit any piety which was not plain reason and duty.
I know full well that your Lordship's kindness to me personally would be in itself quite enough to win any but the most insensible heart, and, did a clear matter of conscience occur in which I felt bound to act for myself, my feelings towards your Lordship would be a most severe trial to me, independently of the higher considerations to which I have alluded; but I trust I have shown my dutifulness to you prior to the influence of personal motives; and this I have done because I think that to belong to the Catholic Church is the first of all privileges here below, as involving in it heavenly privileges, and because I consider the Church over which your Lordship presides to be the Catholic Church in this country.
Yet they were undeniably good; better, perhaps, than any painful and laborious dutifulness; so that the strictly moral consciousness might run over, and presently lose itself in "something higher". Indeed, even health, beauty, and intelligence, which seemed at first so clearly good, might lose their sharpness on a wider view.
Dorothea pushed the one wooden armchair of the room to the stove, and August flew to set the jug of beer on a little round table, and fill a long clay pipe; for their father was good to them all, and seldom raised his voice in anger, and they had been trained by the mother they had loved to dutifulness and obedience and a watchful affection.
The result was, of course, that Marjorie, under cover of a very real dutifulness, ruled both her parents completely; her mother acknowledged the dominion, at least, to herself and her husband; her father pretended that he did not; and on this occasion rose, perhaps, nearer to repudiating it than ever in his life.
Two things had helped her to carry out her engagement to submit in this final instance of dutifulness one was the sight of that hateful rigid face and glacier eye of Tresten; the other was the loophole she left for subsequent insurgency by engaging to write to Count Hollinger's envoy, Dr. Storchel.
Till he saw it, he could not conceive that order and dutifulness could coexist with liveliness and great charms of mind and manners; and when the fact was out of sight, he went back to his old notion, that affectionate parents and dutiful daughters must be dull, prudish, and tiresome.
I think I owe it to myself, and to the maids, Sue, to take that responsibility entirely!" Susan recognized the unchanged sweetness and dutifulness that had marked the old Isabel, who could with perfect simplicity and reason seem to make a virtue of whatever she did.
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