“If had it once, it has left me many a long day ago!”
“But I deny that you ever had it. You had the woman's trick of affecting to believe, and thus making out what you assumed to think, to be a pledge given by another,—a bit of female craft that you all trade on so long as you are young and good-looking?”
“And what supplies the place of this ingenious device when we are neither young nor good-looking?”
“I don't know, for the simple reason that I never much interested myself in the sex after that period.”
“That's a very sad thing for us. I declare I never had an idea how much we 're to be pitied before.”
“You would be to be pitied if you knew how we all think of you;” and he spoke with a spiteful malignity almost demoniac.
“It's better, then, for each of us that we should not know this. The trustfulness that you sneer at does us good service, after all.”
“And it was this story of the mine that induced Lendrick to come home from the Cape, wasn't it?”
“No; he only heard of the mine since he arrived here.”
“I thought,” rejoined he, with a sneer, “that he ought to have resigned his appointment on account of this sudden wealth, all the more because I have known that he intended to come back this many a day. And what is Fossbrooke going to do for you? Is there a diamond necklace ordered? or is it one of the brats he is going to adopt?”