As people are
born blind or scrofulous, so I suppose others can be born devoid of
heart or conscience, inheriting from a degenerate ancestry sundry
mean and vile propensities in their places. Human nature is
a scale that runs both up and down, and it is astonishing how far
the extremes can be apart."
"How high is it possible for the same individual to rise in this
scale? I imagine we are all prone to judge of people as if they
were finished pictures, and to think that the defects our first
scrutiny discovers will remain for all time. It is in real life
much as in fiction. From first to last a villain is a villain,
as if he had been created one. The heroine is a moss rose-bud by
equal and unchanging necessity. Is this girl a fool, and will she
remain one by any innate compulsion? By Jove! I would like to see
her again in the searching light of day. I would like to follow
her career sufficiently long, to discover whether nature has been
guilty of the grotesque crime of associating inseparably with that
fine form and those exquisite features, a hideous little mind that
must go on intensifying its dwarfed deformity, until death snuffs
it out. If this be true, the beautiful little monster that is
bothering me so suggests a knotty problem to wiser heads than mine.
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