Never was peace endangered between his
mother and him, except when she chanced to make use of some evil
maxim which she thought experience had taught her, and the look
her son cast upon her stung her to the heart, making her for a
moment feel as if she had sinned what the theologians call the
unpardonable sin. When he rose and walked from the room without a
word, she would feel as if abandoned to her wickedness, and be
miserable until she saw him again. Something like a spring-
cleaning would begin and go on in her for some time after, and
her eyes would every now and then steal toward her judge with a
glance of awe and fearful apology. But, however correct Godfrey
might be in his judgment of the worldly, that judgment was less
inspired by the harmonies of the universe than by the discords
that had jarred his being and the poisonous shocks he had
received in the encounter of the noble with the ignoble. There
was yet in him a profound need of redemption into the love of the
truth for the truth's sake. He had the fault of thinking too well
of himself--which who has not who thinks of himself at all, apart
from his relation to the holy force of life, within yet beyond
him? It was the almost unconscious, assuredly the undetected,
self-approbation of the ordinarily righteous man, the defect of
whose righteousness makes him regard himself as upright, but the
virtue of whose uprightness will at length disclose to his
astonished view how immeasurably short of rectitude he comes.
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