All this was hardly genuine, for he was not altogether unmoved; but
he was a man of rare self-command, and chose to impress on Alfred that he
was no more to be broken or melted than a mere rock.
It is always precarious to act a part; and this cynicism was rather able
than wise: Alfred looked up and watched him keenly as he read the
monetary article with tranquil interest; and then, for the first time in
his life, it flashed into the young man's mind that his father was not a
father. "I never knew him till now," thought he. "This man is [Greek
text]."*
*Without bowels of affection.
Thus a gesture, so to speak, sowed the first seed of downright disunion
in Richard Hardie's house--disunion, a fast-growing plant, when men set
it in the soil of the passions.
Alfred, unlike Julia, had no panacea. Had any lips, except perhaps hers,
told him that "to be good is to be happy here below," he would have
replied: _"Negatur;_ contradicted by daily experience." It never occurred
to him, therefore, to go out of himself, and sympathise with the sordid
sorrows of the poor, and their bottomless egotism in contact with the
well-to-do.
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