What is it about some people that, in spite of ourselves, they thus force
out of us the best part of our nature; that base and unworthy thoughts
cannot live in us before them,--that they melt out of our hearts as the
snow before the rays of the sun? Even though the effect may be transient,
such is the power of their faith, and their truth, and their goodness,
that it must needs call forth in us something of the same spirit as their
own.
Such was Eustace Daintree's influence over Vera. It was not because of
his office, for no one was less susceptible than Vera--a Protestant
brought up, with but vague ideas of her own faith, in a Catholic land--to
any of those recognized associations with which a purely English-bred
girl might have felt the character of the clergyman of the parish where
she lived to be invested. It was nothing of that sort that made him great
to her; it was, simply and solely, the goodness of the man that impressed
her. His guilelessness, his simplicity of mind, his absolute uprightness
of character, and, with it all, the absence in him of any assumption of
authority, or of any superiority of character over those about him.
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