'No, sir, I do not forget. To lead a life as monotonous as mine

has been during many years, is not the way to forget. To lead a life of

self-correction is not the way to forget. To be sensible of having (as

we all have, every one of us, all the children of Adam!) offences

to expiate and peace to make, does not justify the desire to forget.

Therefore I have long dismissed it, and I neither forget nor wish to

forget.' Mr Flintwinch, who had latterly been shaking the sediment at the bottom

of his tea-cup, round and round, here gulped it down, and putting the

cup in the tea-tray, as done with, turned his eyes upon Mr Blandois as

if to ask him what he thought of that?

'All expressed, madam,' said Mr Blandois, with his smoothest bow and his

white hand on his breast, 'by the word "naturally," which I am proud

to have had sufficient apprehension and appreciation (but without

appreciation I could not be Blandois) to employ.'

'Pardon me, sir,' she returned, 'if I doubt the likelihood of a

gentleman of pleasure, and change, and politeness, accustomed to court

and to be courted--' 'Oh madam! By Heaven!' '--

If I doubt the likelihood of such a character quite comprehending

what belongs to mine in my circumstances. Not to obtrude doctrine upon

you,' she looked at the rigid pile of hard pale books before her, '(for

you go your own way, and the consequences are on your own head), I will

say this much: that I shape my course by pilots, strictly by proved and

tried pilots, under whom I cannot be shipwrecked--can not be--and that

if I were unmindful of the admonition conveyed in those three letters, I

should not be half as chastened as I am.'

It was curious how she seized the occasion to argue with some invisible

opponent. Perhaps with her own better sense, always turning upon herself

and her own deception.

'If I forgot my ignorances in my life of health and freedom, I might

complain of the life to which I am now condemned. I never do; I never

have done. If I forgot that this scene, the Earth, is expressly meant to

be a scene of gloom, and hardship, and dark trial, for the creatures who

are made out of its dust, I might have some tenderness for its vanities.

But I have no such tenderness. If I did not know that we are, every one,

the subject (most justly the subject) of a wrath that must be satisfied,

and against which mere actions are nothing, I might repine at the

difference between me, imprisoned here, and the people who pass that

gateway yonder.




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