picture: characteristic of a season rather than cheerless in tone, though
it breathed little cheer. Is there not a pleasure in contemplating that
which is characteristic? Her unfinished sketch recalled him after he had
gone: he lived in it, to startle her again, and bid her heart gallop and
her cheeks burn. The question occurred to her: May not one love, not
craving to be beloved? Such a love does not sap our pride, but supports
it; increases rather than diminishes our noble self-esteem. To attain
such a love the martyrs writhed up to the crown of saints. For a while
Cecilia revelled in the thought that she could love in this most saint-
like manner. How they fled, the sordid ideas of him which accused him
of the world's one passion, and were transferred to her own bosom in
reproach that she should have imagined them existing in his! He talked
simply and sweetly of his defeat, of time wasted away from the canvass,
of loss of money: and he had little to spare, he said. The water-colour
drawing interested him. He said he envied her that power of isolation,
and the eye for beauty in every season. She opened a portfolio of Mr.
Tuckham's water-colour drawings in every clime; scenes of Europe, Asia,
and the Americas; and he was to be excused for not caring to look through
them. His remark, that they seemed hard and dogged, was not so unjust,
she thought, smiling to think of the critic criticized. His wonderment
that a young man like his Lancastrian cousin should be 'an unmitigated
Tory' was perhaps natural.

Cecilia said, 'Yet I cannot discern in him a veneration for aristocracy.'
'That's not wanted for modern Toryism,' said Nevil. 'One may venerate
old families when they show the blood of the founder, and are not dead
wood. I do. And I believe the blood of the founder, though the man may
have been a savage and a robber, had in his day finer elements in it than
were common. But let me say at a meeting that I respect true
aristocracy, I hear a growl and a hiss beginning: why? Don't judge them