The nobles of the land are bound in honour to their posterity.
There you have one of the prominent permanent distinctions between them and the commonalty.
His mother would again propose her chosen bride for him: Edith Averst, with the dowry of a present one thousand pounds per annum, and prospect of six or so, excluding Sir John's estate, Carping, in Leicestershire; a fair estate, likely to fall to Edith; consumption seized her brothers as they ripened.

A fair girl too; only Dudley did not love her; he wanted to love.

He was learning the trick from this other one, who had become obscured and diminished, tainted, to the thought of her; yet not extinct.

Sight of her was to be dreaded.
Unguiltily tainted, in herself she was innocent.

That constituted the unhappy invitation to him to swallow one half of his feelings, which had his world's blessing on it, for the beneficial enlargement and enthronement of the baser unblest half, which he hugged and distrusted.
Can innocence issue of the guilty?
He asked it, hopeing it might be possible: he had been educated in his family to believe, that the laws governing human institutions are divine--until History has altered them.
They are altered, to present a fresh bulwark against the infidel.