They
are not sufficiently used to its ugly face not to dislike it,
though it may not be quite so ugly as their _protege_. A man
will feel grandly honest against the dishonesties of another
trade than his, and be eager to justify those of his own. Here
was Sepia, who did not care the dust of a butterfly's wing for
causing any amount of family misery, who would without a pang
have sacrificed the genuine reputation of an innocent man to save
her own false one--shuddering at an idea as yet bodiless in her
brain--an idea which, however, she did not dismiss, and so grew
able to endure!
I have kept this woman--so far as personal acquaintance with her
is concerned--in the background of my history. For one thing, I
am not fond of _post-mortem_ examinations; in other words, I
do not like searching the decompositions of moral carrion.
Analysis of such is, like the use of reagents on dirt, at least
unpleasant. Nor was any true end to be furthered by a more vivid
presentation of her. Nosology is a science doomed, thank God, to
perish! Health alone will at last fill the earth. Or, if there
should be always the ailing to help, a man will help them by
being sound himself, not by knowing the ins and outs of disease.
Diagnosis is not therapy.
Sepia was unnatural--as every one is unnatural who does not set
his face in the direction of the true Nature; but she had gone
further in the opposite direction than many people have yet
reached.
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