"
"I am sorry for that!"
"You have the same way of representing--of misrepresenting, yourself."
"Well, if I am not changed," said Bernard, "I can ill afford to lose so
valuable an art."
"Taking you altogether, I am glad you are the same," Gordon answered,
simply; "but you must come into my part of the house."
CHAPTER XVII
Yes, he was conscious--he was very conscious; so Bernard reflected
during the two or three first days of his visit to his friend. Gordon
knew it must seem strange to so irreverent a critic that a man who had
once aspired to the hand of so intelligent a girl--putting other things
aside--as Angela Vivian should, as the Ghost in "Hamlet" says, have
"declined upon" a young lady who, in force of understanding, was so very
much Miss Vivian's inferior; and this knowledge kept him ill at his
ease and gave him a certain pitiable awkwardness. Bernard's sense of
the anomaly grew rapidly less acute; he made various observations which
helped it to seem natural. Blanche was wonderfully pretty; she was very
graceful, innocent, amusing. Since Gordon had determined to marry a
little goose, he had chosen the animal with extreme discernment. It had
quite the plumage of a swan, and it sailed along the stream of life with
an extraordinary lightness of motion.
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