Page:Arminell, a social romance (1896).djvu/277

Rh shows as he is, but dresses in the part he wishes to appear in. Some men and women are such finished actors that they forget themselves in their assumed parts, and such was her father. Having to occupy the position of a county magnate, he had come to fit the position exteriorly, and had accommodated his conscience to the delusion that he was what he pretended to be—the wealthy, blameless, honourable nobleman, against whom not a stone could be cast. All this was a pretence, and Arminell was not angry, only her moral nature revolted at the assumption. Her high principle and downrightness made her resent the fraud that had been perpetrated on herself and the world.

She had on several occasions heard her father speak in public, and had felt ashamed because he spoke so badly, but chiefly because she was convinced that he was repeating, parrot-like, what had been put into his mouth by my lady. He pretended to speak his own thoughts, and he spoke those of his wife—that was an assumption, and so was his respectability, so his morality.

Arminell had long undervalued her father's mental powers, but she had believed in his rectitude. She thought his virtue was like that stupid going-straightforward that is found in a farmer's horse, which will jog along the road, and go straight, and be asleep as it goes. But Mrs. Saltren's story, which she believed in spite of the improbabilities—improbabilities she did not stop to consider, had overthrown the conviction, and she now saw in her father a man as morally imperfect as he was intellectually deficient.

Had he been open, and not attempted to disguise his offence, she might have forgiven him, but when he assumed the disguise of an upright God-fearing man, doing his duty, her strictly truthful nature rose up in indignant protest.

"My dear!" exclaimed Lady Lamerton; "good gracious, what is this I hear? What have you done? Undertaken