Your principles were eminently just.

Had not their rectitude and their firmness been attested by your treatment of that specious seducer Dashwood?
These principles, I was prone to believe, exempted you from danger in this new state of things.

I was not the last to pay my homage to the unrivalled capacity, insinuation, and eloquence of this man.

I have disguised, but could never stifle the conviction, that his eyes and voice had a witchcraft in them, which rendered him truly formidable: but I reflected on the ambiguous expression of his countenance--an ambiguity which you were the first to remark; on the cloud which obscured his character; and on the suspicious nature of that concealment which he studied; and concluded you to be safe.

I denied the obvious construction to appearances.