Ah! if we could all keep at the point, "_I will arise_," or better still, at the place where the Father meets us, how good, and lowly, and tender-hearted we should be! No, "_thou never gavest me a kid;_" no, "_this thy son, which hath devoured thy substance!_" Strange that the memory of such moments (and what Christian life can be without such?) should not keep the heart ever broken and open. The best way towards this, no doubt, is to have such an arising and such an embracing every day we live. I am sure we need it. However, we did not exactly do this at that time at Netherby. Aunt Dorothy, on thinking matters over with her "sober judgment," thought it a duty to warn us against the "spirit of bondage," which, with all her sweetness, had restrained poor Lady Lucy's prayers to the limits of the Prayer-Look. Cousin Placidia, the immediate anxiety having subsided, could not but feel that Roger's vehemence had added another step to the distance which already separated them. Once on that Pharisaic height, to which, alas! we so easily rise without any trouble of climbing, being puffed up thither by windy substances within and without, other people's falls necessarily increase our comparative elevation above them; and whether this is caused by their descent or by our ascent is difficult to determine; just as in the case of one boat passing another, it is difficult by the mere sense of sight to ascertain which is moving. Not that Placidia asserted this conscious superiority by reproaches. Did she need to descend to speech? Was not her life a reproach? That placid life, unbroken by any movement deeper than the soft ripples of an approving conscience; or a calm disapproval of any one attempting an encroachment on her rights,--which of course she never permitted. Had she not heard of Archbishop Laud's cruelties to the three gentlemen in the pillory with no further emotion than a gentle regret that the three gentlemen could not have held their tongues? Had she not, on the other hand, heard the tidings of Lord Stratford's arrest, and the destruction of the Star-Chamber Court, with no more vehement feeling than a remark on the vanity of human greatness, and a gentle hope that it might lead to the abolition of the very inconvenient monopolies on pepper and soap? Had she not always warned Roger and me against severity on Sir Launcelot? Had she not even gone the length of pronouncing him a very fine gentleman? And what could be more striking than the subsequent justification of her warnings by the revengeful act to which Roger had been betrayed?