"No, sirs I am willing to be advised. Against what would you warn me?"
"The hollowness of life, the fatuity of your hopes, the treachery of that human nature of which you speak so tenderly and reverently. So surely as you put faith in the truth and nobility of humanity, you will find it as soft-lipped and vicious as Paolo Orsini, who folded his wife, Isabella de Medici, most lovingly in his arms, and while he tenderly pressed her to his heart, slipped a cord around her neck and strangled her."
"I know, sir, that human nature is weak, selfish, sinful--that such treacherous monsters as Ezzolino and the Visconti have stained the annals of our race with blood-blotches, which the stream of time will never efface; but the law of compensation operates here as well as in other departments, and brings to light a 'fidus Achates' and Antoninus. I believe that human nature is a curious amalgam of meanness, malice and magnanimity, and that an earnest, loving Christian charity is the only safe touchstone, and furnishes (if you will tolerate the simile) the only elective affinity in moral chemistry. Because ingots are not dug out of the earth, is it not equally unwise and ungrateful to ridicule and denounce the hopeful, patient, tireless laborers who handle the alloy and ultimately disintegrate the precious metal? Even if the world were bankrupt in morality and religion--which, thank God, it is not--one grand shining example, like Mr. Hammond, whose unswerving consistency, noble charity, and sublime unselfishness all concede and revere, ought to leaven the mass of sneering cynics, and win them to a belief in their capacity for rising to pure, holy, almost perfect lives."
"Spare me a repetition of the rhapsodies of Madame Guyon! I am not surprised that such a novice as you prove yourself should, in the stereotyped style of orthodoxy, swear by the hoary Tartuffe, that hypocritical wolf, Allan Hammond--"
"Stop, Mr. Murray! You must not, shall not use such language in my presence concerning one whom I love and revere above all other human beings! How dare you malign that noble Christian, whose lips daily lift your name to God, praying for pardon and for peace? Oh! how ungrateful, how unworthy you are of his affection and his prayers!"
She had interrupted him with an imperious wave of her hand, and stood regarding him with an expression of indignation and detestation.
"I neither possess nor desire his affection or his prayers."
"Sir, you know that you do not deserve, but you most certainly have both."