He had often asked himself
what he should say to her, how he should carry himself, and how he
should probably find the young lady; but, with whatever ingenuity he
might at the moment have answered these questions, his intelligence at
present felt decidedly overtaxed. She was a very pretty girl to whom he
had done a wrong; this was the final attitude into which, with a good
deal of preliminary shifting and wavering, she had settled in his
recollection. The wrong was a right, doubtless, from certain points of
view; but from the girl's own it could only seem an injury to which its
having been inflicted by a clever young man with whom she had been on
agreeable terms, necessarily added a touch of baseness.
In every disadvantage that a woman suffers at the hands of a man, there
is inevitably, in what concerns the man, an element of cowardice. When I
say "inevitably," I mean that this is what the woman sees in it. This is
what Bernard believed that Angela Vivian saw in the fact that by giving
his friend a bad account of her he had prevented her making an opulent
marriage. At first he had said to himself that, whether he had held
his tongue or spoken, she had already lost her chance; but with time,
somehow, this reflection had lost its weight in the scale.
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