She had, by her own confession,
conceived a strong dislike to Dorothy the moment she saw her, and
without love there can be no understanding. Hate will sharpen
observation to the point of microscopic vision, affording
opportunity for many a shrewd guess, and revealing facts for the
construction of the cleverest and falsest theories, but will leave
the observer as blind as any bat to the scope of the whole, or the
meaning of the parts which can be understood only from the whole;
for love alone can interpret.
As she gazed on the signs of conflicting emotion in Dorothy's
changes of colour and expression, Amanda came quickly enough to the
conclusion that nothing would account for them but the assumption
that the sly puritanical minx was in love with the handsome young
roundhead. How else could the deathly pallor of her countenance
while she fixed her eyes wide and unmoving upon his face, and the
flush that ever and anon swept its red shadow over the pallor as she
cast them on the ground at some brave word from the lips of the
canting psalm-singer, be in the least intelligible? Then came the
difficulty: how in that case was her share in his capture to be
explained? But here Amanda felt herself in her own province, and
before the marquis rose, had constructed a very clever theory, in
which exercise of ingenuity, however, unluckily for its truth, she
had taken for granted that Dorothy's nature corresponded to her own,
and reasoned freely from the character of the one to the conduct of
the other.
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