He bit his lip, and took a little time for consideration.
'Well! If it should unhappily appear,' he said, 'after due pains
and duty on my part, that I am brought to a position so desolate as
this banishment, I shall not become the lady's persecutor. But you
said you had no commission from her?'
'I have only the commission of my love for her, and her love for
me. I have no other trust, than that I have been with her since
she came home, and that she has given me her confidence. I have no
further trust, than that I know something of her character and her
marriage. O Mr. Harthouse, I think you had that trust too!'
He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been - in
that nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have
lived if they had not been whistled away - by the fervour of this
reproach.
'I am not a moral sort of fellow,' he said, 'and I never make any
pretensions to the character of a moral sort of fellow. I am as
immoral as need be. At the same time, in bringing any distress
upon the lady who is the subject of the present conversation, or in
unfortunately compromising her in any way, or in committing myself
by any expression of sentiments towards her, not perfectly
reconcilable with - in fact with - the domestic hearth; or in
taking any advantage of her father's being a machine, or of her
brother's being a whelp, or of her husband's being a bear; I beg to
be allowed to assure you that I have had no particularly evil
intentions, but have glided on from one step to another with a
smoothness so perfectly diabolical, that I had not the slightest
idea the catalogue was half so long until I began to turn it over.
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