And with his aid too!
The audacity of the man would have seemed sublime if she had
felt sure that he knew the difference between good and evil,
between a lie and the truth; but the more she saw of him, the surer
she was that his courage was mere moral paralysis, and that he
talked about virtue and vice as a man who is colour-blind talks
about red and green; he did not see them as she saw them; if left to
choose for himself he would have nothing to guide him. Was it
politics that had caused this atrophy of the moral senses by disuse?
Meanwhile, here she sat face to face with a moral lunatic, who had
not even enough sense of humour to see the absurdity of his own
request, that she should go out to the shore of this ocean of
corruption, and repeat the ancient r?le of King Canute, or Dame
Partington with her mop and her pail. What was to be done with
such an animal?
The bystander who looked on at this scene with a wider knowledge
of facts, might have found entertainment in another view of the
subject, that is to say, in the guilelessness ot Madeleine Lee. With
all her warnings she was yet a mere baby-in-arms in the face of the
great politician. She accepted his story as true, and she thought it
as bad as possible; but had Mr.
Ratcliffe's associates now been present to hear his version of it,
they would have looked at each other with a smile of professional
pride, and would have roundly sworn that he was, beyond a doubt,
the ablest man this country had ever produced, and next to certain
of being President.
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