‘My dear,’ said Miss Cherry, trembling a little, ‘it is always dangerous to apply abstract principles so. When I say that Mrs. Meredith was a long time away from her husband, I do not say that she is _false_. Oh, Cara, no! that would be terrible. If I say anything, all I mean is that she could not be so grieved, not so _dreadfully_ grieved, as a woman would be whose husband had been always with her. Think of the boys, for instance; they did not know him really; they may be very sorry; but, how different would it be if it was a father like your father! And other people--what do you mean by other people?’ ‘Nothing,’ said Cara, turning away, for she could not reply to Miss Cherry’s argument. Would she indeed, in her own person, grieve for her father more than the Merediths did for theirs? Here was another mystery unpenetrated by Miss Cherry, incomprehensible to herself. Nobody knew the gulf that lay between her and him, and she could not tell herself what it meant. How kind he had been to her, though she repaid him in this way; but did he love--really love--his child any more than she loved him? Did anybody love any other, or only pretend and go through the semblance of loving? She did not doubt her aunts, it is true; but then her certainty in respect to them took, to some degree, the form of indifference. Taken for granted, not inquired into, that love itself might have failed, perhaps--but Cara never thought of it as possible. It was like the sunny house it dwelt on, always open, due not to anything in her, but to the mere fact that she was Cara. They would have loved any other kind of girl, she said to herself, under the same name just as well. Poor child! she was like Hamlet, though unaware of that sublimity. Friends, lovers, relations, all had failed her. Every soul thought of himself--no one truly or unfeignedly of others. Her head swam, her heart sank, the firm ground gave way under her feet wherever she turned. It might not cost the others much, but it cost her a great deal; even she herself in her own person: did she love more truly than they did? No; she was not devoted to her father, nor to Oswald, whom she was supposed to care for; and if to--anyone else, then they did not care for her, Cara said to herself, and fled from her thoughts with a beating heart.