Clifton has entirely altered his behaviour to Frank; he now treats him with unaffected freedom and respect. But his impatience relative to me has not abated. Tomorrow we are to have some conversation, after which I imagine he wishes to make proposals to Sir Arthur.
Would you think, Louisa, that I sometimes suffer myself to be surprised into fears; and that I then find myself ready to retract, or at least questioning whether I ought to proceed.
There is something fatally erroneous in the impatient propensities of the human mind. How seldom does it stay so fully to examine a question as to leave no remaining doubt, and to act on a preconcerted and consistent plan! Yet it never acts with safety, or with satisfaction, except when it has or imagines it has made this examination. If our motives be few, slow, and feeble, we then are heavy, dull, and stupid: if they be quick, numerous, and strong, we are too apt implicitly to obey first impulses, and to hurry headlong into folly and extravagance. Yet these last only can give energy; and, having them, wisdom will consist in being able to curb them, so as to give full time for consideration.
The conscious want of this in myself is what I blame. How often am I surprised by unexpected circumstances, which I ought to have foreseen, and against which I ought to have provided! If I have any doubts of myself, if I am not certain of producing those effects on the mind of Clifton which I know I ought to be able to produce, it becomes me to recede. Or rather it becomes me to apply myself, with the resolution of which I am so ready to vaunt, to attain that which is attainable, to discover the true means, the clue to his mind, and to persevere.
I have sometimes suspected myself of being influenced by his fine form, and the charms of his wit and gaiety. At others I have even doubted whether I were not more actuated by an affection for my Louisa, than by a sense of incumbent duty. But, consider the subject how I will, that there is a duty, and that I am called upon to fulfil it, is an unerring decision.
There must be no concealment. I must explain my whole chain of reasonings to him: for nothing appears more indubitable to me than that duplicity never can conduce to good. The only fear is that I should be deficient in my detail, and present my plan so as to give it a false appearance. Truth partially told becomes falsehood: and it was a kind of blind consciousness of this which first induced men to countenance dissimulation. They felt their inability to do justice to truth, and therefore concluded hypocrisy was a virtue, and, strange to tell, truth itself sometimes a vice. It was a lamentable mistake. It is partial truth, or in other words falsehood, which is the vice.
