‘And had not charity,’ I continued for him. ‘Precisely. I won’t go on, but your quotation is very apt.’ ‘I so bow down before her simplicity. It makes a wide and beautiful margin for the rest of her character. She is a girl Ruskin would have loved.’ ‘I wonder,’ said I. ‘He did seem fond of the simple type, didn’t he?’ ‘Her mind is so clear, so transparent. The motive spring of everything she says and does is so direct. Don’t you find you can most completely depend upon her?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I said; ‘certainly. I nearly always know what she is going to say before she says it, and under given circumstances I can tell precisely what she will do.’ ‘I fancy her sense of duty is very beautifully developed.’ ‘It is,’ I said. ‘There is hardly a day when I do not come in contact with it.’ ‘Well, that is surely a good thing. And I find that calm poise of hers very restful.’ ‘I would not have believed that so many virtues could reside in one young lady,’ I said, taking refuge in flippancy, ‘and to think that she should be my daughter!’ ‘As I believe you know, that seems to me rather a cruel stroke of destiny, Mrs. Farnham.’ ‘Oh yes, I know! You have a constructive imagination, Dacres. You don’t seem to see that the girl is protected by her limitations, like a tortoise. She lives within them quite secure and happy and content. How determined you are to be sorry for her!’ Mr. Tottenham looked at the end of this lively exchange as though he sought for a polite way of conveying to me that I rather was the limited person. He looked as if he wished he could say things. The first of them would be, I saw, that he had quite a different conception of Cecily, that it was illuminated by many trifles, nuances of feeling and expression, which he had noticed in his talks with her whenever they had skirted the subject of her adoption by her mother. He knew her, he was longing to say, better than I did; when it would have been natural to reply that one could not hope to compete in such a direction with an intelligent young man, and we should at once have been upon delicate and difficult ground. So it was as well perhaps that he kept silence until he said, as he had come prepared to say, ‘Well, I want to put that beyond a doubt--her happiness--if I’m good enough. I want her, please, and I only hope that she will be half as willing to come as you are likely to be to let her go.’ It was a shock when it came, plump, like that; and I was horrified to feel how completely every other consideration was lost for the instant in the immense relief that it prefigured. To be my whole complete self again, without the feeling that a fraction of me was masquerading about in Cecily! To be freed at once, or almost, from an exacting condition and an impossible ideal! ‘Oh!’ I exclaimed, and my eyes positively filled. ‘You ARE good, Dacres, but I couldn’t let you do that.’