From the two elder, the responses for the division of his lands were graceful and fitting, but he longed to hear what Cordelia, his youngest and best beloved child, would say.

He looked toward her expectantly, but instead of delight and gratitude there was the first dawn of character.

Cordelia made the awkward attempt of an untrained soul to be honest and scrupulously to express her inmost feeling.

The king was baffled and distressed by this attempt at self-expression.

It was new to him that his daughter should be moved by a principle obtained outside himself, which even his imagination could not follow; that she had caught the notion of an existence in which her relation as a daughter played but a part.