"Apart from my loathing of deception, of falseness in any shape, upon any grounds, I hold it an imperious duty to expose, punish, off with it. I take it to be one of the forms of noxiousness which a good citizen is bound to extirpate. I am not myself good citizen enough, I confess, for much more than passive abhorrence. I do not forgive: I am at heart serious and I cannot forgive:--there is no possible reconciliation, there can be only an ostensible truce, between the two hostile powers dividing this world." She glanced at him quickly. "Good and evil!" he said. Her face expressed a surprise relapsing on the heart. He spelt the puckers of her forehead to mean that she feared he might be speaking unchristianly. "You will find it so in all religions, my dear Laetitia: the Hindoo, the Persian, ours. It is universal; an experience of our humanity. Deceit and sincerity cannot live together. Truth must kill the lie, or the lie will kill truth. I do not forgive. All I say to the person is, go!" "But that is right! that is generous!" exclaimed Laetitia, glad to approve him for the sake of escaping her critical soul, and relieved by the idea of Clara's difficulty solved. "Capable of generosity, perhaps," he mused, aloud. She wounded him by not supplying the expected enthusiastic asseveration of her belief in his general tendency to magnanimity. He said, after a pause: "But the world is not likely to be impressed by anything not immediately gratifying it. People change, I find: as we increase in years we cease to be the heroes we were. I myself am insensible to change: I do not admit the charge. Except in this we will say: personal ambition. I have it no more. And what is it when we have it? Decidedly a confession of inferiority! That is, the desire to be distinguished is an acknowledgement of insufficiency. But I have still the craving for my dearest friends to think well of me. A weakness? Call it so. Not a dishonourable weakness!" Laetitia racked her brain for the connection of his present speech with the preceding dialogue. She was baffled, from not knowing "the heat of the centre in him", as Vernon opaquely phrased it in charity to the object of her worship.