‘What ineffable generosity! You can really constrain yourself to believe that I have been insulted!’
‘I should not say insulted.’
‘You cannot be an honest judge in such a cause. Every outrage offered to me was an act of homage to yourself! If you but knew how I burned to tell him who it was whose hand he held in his, and to whose ears he had poured out his raptures! To tell him, too, how the Greek girl would have resented his presumption, had he but dared to indulge it! One of the women-servants, it would seem, was a witness to this boy’s declaration. I think it was Mary was in the room, I do not know for how long, but she announced her presence by asking some question about candles. In fact, I shall have become a servants’-hall scandal by this time.’
‘There need not be any fear of that, Nina: there are no bad tongues amongst our people.’
‘I know all that. I know we live amidst human perfectabilities—all of Irish manufacture, and warranted to be genuine.’
‘I would hope that some of your impressions of Ireland are not unfavourable?’
‘I scarcely know. I suppose you understand each other, and are tolerant about capricious moods and ways, which, to strangers, might seem to have a deeper significance. I believe you are not as hasty, or as violent, or as rash as you seem, and I am sure you are not as impulsive in your generosity, or as headlong in your affections. Not exactly that you mean to be false, but you are hypocrites to yourselves.’
‘A very flattering picture of us.’
‘I do not mean to flatter you; and it is to this end I say, you are Italians without the subtlety of the Italian, and Greeks without their genius.—You need not curtsy so profoundly.—I could say worse than this, Kate, if I were minded to do so.’
‘Pray do not be so minded, then. Pray remember that, even when you wound me, I cannot return the thrust.’