Perfect love, as we know, casteth out fear: your father loves you
perfectly, my darling, but he does not feel as though you loved him
perfectly in return. If you fear him it is because you do not love him
as he deserves, and I know it sometimes cuts him to the very heart
to think that he has earned from you a deeper and more willing
sympathy than you display towards him. Oh, Ernest, Ernest, do not
grieve one who is so good and noble-hearted by conduct which I can
call by no other name than ingratitude."
Ernest could never stand being spoken to in this way by his
mother: for he still believed that she loved him, and that he was fond
of her and had a friend in her- up to a certain point. But his
mother was beginning to come to the end of her tether; she had
played the domestic confidence trick upon him times without number
already. Over and over again had she wheedled from him all she
wanted to know, and afterwards got him into the most horrible scrape
by telling the whole to Theobald. Ernest had remonstrated more than
once upon these occasions, and had pointed out to his mother how
disastrous to him his confidences had been, but Christina had always
joined issue with him and showed him in the clearest possible manner
that in each case she had been right, and that he could not reasonably
complain.
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