"He was terribly violent,"
Morris wrote; "but you know my self-control. I have need of it all
when I remember that I have it in my power to break in upon your
cruel captivity." Catherine sent him, in answer to this, a note of
three lines. "I am in great trouble; do not doubt of my affection,
but let me wait a little and think." The idea of a struggle with her
father, of setting up her will against his own, was heavy on her
soul, and it kept her formally submissive, as a great physical weight
keeps us motionless. It never entered into her mind to throw her
lover off; but from the first she tried to assure herself that there
would be a peaceful way out of their difficulty. The assurance was
vague, for it contained no element of positive conviction that her
father would change his mind. She only had an idea that if she
should be very good, the situation would in some mysterious manner
improve. To be good, she must be patient, respectful, abstain from
judging her father too harshly, and from committing any act of open
defiance. He was perhaps right, after all, to think as he did; by
which Catherine meant not in the least that his judgement of Morris's
motives in seeking to marry her was perhaps a just one, but that it
was probably natural and proper that conscientious parents should be
suspicious and even unjust. There were probably people in the world
as bad as her father supposed Morris to be, and if there were the
slightest chance of Morris being one of these sinister persons, the
Doctor was right in taking it into account.
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