'fictitious sorrows harden the heart to real ones.'

Argemone was almost angry with her sometimes, when she trotted whole
days about the village from school to sick-room: perhaps conscience
hinted to her that her duty, too, lay rather there than among her
luxurious day-dreams. But, alas! though she would have indignantly
repelled the accusation of selfishness, yet in self and for self
alone she lived; and while she had force of will for any so-called
'self-denial,' and would fast herself cross and stupefied, and quite
enjoy kneeling thinly clad and barefoot on the freezing chapel-floor
on a winter's morning, yet her fastidious delicacy revolted at
sitting, like Honoria, beside the bed of the ploughman's consumptive
daughter, in a reeking, stifling, lean-to garret, in which had slept
the night before, the father, mother, and two grown-up boys, not to
mention a new-married couple, the sick girl, and, alas! her baby.
And of such bedchambers there were too many in Whitford Priors.

The first evening that Lancelot came downstairs, Honoria clapped her
hands outright for joy as he entered, and ran up and down for ten
minutes, fetching and carrying endless unnecessary cushions and
footstools; while Argemone greeted him with a cold distant bow, and
a fine-lady drawl of carefully commonplace congratulations. Her
heart smote her though, as she saw the wan face and the wild,
melancholy, moonstruck eyes once more glaring through and through
her; she found a comfort in thinking his stare impertinent, drew
herself up, and turned away; once, indeed, she could not help
listening, as Lancelot thanked Mrs. Lavington for all the pious and
edifying books with which the good lady had kept his room rather
than his brain furnished for the last six weeks; he was going to say
more, but he saw the colonel's quaint foxy eye peering at him,