Reticence and concealment

I am reading Romola, by George Eliot, very slowly, punctuated by other things. The beginning is actually rather hard work, with lots of historical 15th century Italian ponderings and rhetoric. But here are a few more snippets about characters that I like:

Tito had an innate love of reticence – let us say a talent for it – which acted as other impulses do, without conscious motive, and, like all people to whom concealment is easy, he would now and then conceal something which had as little the nature of a secret as the fact that he had seen a flight of crows.

And later:

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. The contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in their commission than in the consequent adjustment of our desires – the enlistment of our self-interest on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is for ever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.

- Romola, George Eliot

Chapter IX