A little perplexed at first, Miss Helena reflected, and recovered herself.
“Ah, yes,” she said; “I was afraid I might be obliged to trouble you for an explanation--I see it now. You are shocked (very properly) when feelings of enmity exist between near relations; and you wish to be assured that I bear no malice toward Eunice. She is violent, she is sulky, she is stupid, she is selfish; and she cruelly refuses to live in the same house with me. Make your mind easy, sir, I forgive my sister.”
Let me not attempt to disguise it--Miss Helena Gracedieu confounded me.
Ordinary audacity is one of those forms of insolence which mature experience dismisses with contempt. This girl’s audacity struck down all resistance, for one shocking reason: it was unquestionably sincere. Strong conviction of her own virtue stared at me in her proud and daring eyes. At that time, I was not aware of what I have learned since. The horrid hardening of her moral sense had been accomplished by herself. In her diary, there has been found the confession of a secret course of reading--with supplementary reflections flowing from it, which need only to be described as worthy of their source.
A person capable of repentance and reform would, in her place, have seen that she had disgusted me. Not a suspicion of this occurred to Miss Helena. “I see you are embarrassed,” she remarked, “and I am at no loss to account for it. You are too polite to acknowledge that I have not made a friend of you yet. Oh, I mean to do it!”
“We shall see,” she replied. “Sooner or later, you will find yourself saying a kind word to my father for Philip and me.” She rose, and took a turn in the room--and stopped, eying me attentively. “Are you thinking of Eunice?” she asked.
“I needn’t ask how I stand in your estimation, after that. Pray express yourself freely. Your looks confess it--you view me with a feeling of aversion.”
The exasperating influences of her language, her looks, and her tones would, as I venture to think, have got to the end of another man’s self-control before this. Anyway, she had at last irritated me into speaking as strongly as I felt. What I said had been so plainly (perhaps so rudely) expressed, that misinterpretation of it seemed to be impossible. She mistook me, nevertheless. The most merciless disclosure of the dreary side of human destiny is surely to be found in the failure of words, spoken or written, so to answer their purpose that we can trust them, in our attempts to communicate with each other. Even when he seems to be connected, by the nearest and dearest relations, with his fellow-mortals, what a solitary creature, tried by the test of sympathy, the human being really is in the teeming world that he inhabits! Affording one more example of the impotence of human language to speak for itself, my misinterpreted words had found their way to the one sensitive place in Helena Gracedieu’s impenetrable nature. She betrayed it in the quivering and flushing of her hard face, and in the appeal to the looking-glass which escaped her eyes the next moment. My hasty reply had roused the idea of a covert insult addressed to her handsome face. In other words, I had wounded her vanity. Driven by resentment, out came the secret distrust of me which had been lurking in that cold heart, from the moment when we first met.