Anthony Trollope: The Belton Estate

19. CHAPTER XI: MISS AMEDROZ HAS ANOTHER CHANCE (continued)

What a cold-hearted, ungenerous wretch he must have been! That will be the verdict against him. But the verdict will be untrue. Cold-hearted and ungenerous he was; but he was no wretch as men and women are now-a-days called wretches. He was chilly hearted, but yet quite capable of enough love to make him a good son, a good husband, and a good father too. And though he was ungenerous from the nature of his temperament, he was not close-fisted or over covetous. And he was a just man, desirous of obtaining nothing that was not fairly his own. But, in truth, the artists have been so much in the habit of painting for us our friends' faces without any of those flaws and blotches with which work and high living are apt to disfigure us, that we turn in disgust from a portrait in which the roughnesses and pimples are made apparent.

But it was essential that he should now do something, and before he sat down to dinner he did show Clara's letter to his mother. 'Mother,' he said, as he sat himself down in her little room upstairs and she knew well by the tone of his voice, and by the mode of his address, that there was to be a solemn occasion, and a serious deliberative council on the present existing family difficulty 'mother, of course I have intended to let you know what is the nature of Clara's answer to my letter.'