“How do you mean? Alice saw it?” said Tony, reddening.
“She saw it, for she said to me one day, 'Mr. Damer, it seems to me you have very punctilious notions on the score of friendship.'
“'I have,' said I; 'you 're right there.'
“'I thought so,' said she.”
“After all,” said Tony, in a half-dogged tone, “I don't see that the speech had any reference to me, or to any peculiar delicacy of yours with respect to me.”
“Ah, my poor Tony, you have a deal to learn about women and their ways! By good luck fortune has given you a friend—the one man—I declare I believe what I say—the one man in Europe that knows the whole thing; as poor Balzac used to say, 'Cher Skeffy, what a fellow you would be if you had my pen!' He was a vain creature, Balzac; but what he meant was, if I could add his descriptive power to my own knowledge of life; for you see, Tony, this was the difference between Balzac and me. He knew Paris and the salons of Paris, and the women who frequent these salons. I knew the human, heart. It was woman, as a creature, not a mere conventionality, that she appeared to me.”
“Well, I take it,” grumbled out Tony, “you and your friend had some points of resemblance too.”
“Ah! you would say that we were both vain. So we were, Tony,—so is every man that is the depository of a certain power. Without this same conscious thought, which you common folk call vanity, how should we come to exercise the gift! The little world taunts us with the very quality that is the essence of our superiority.”
“Had Bella perfectly recovered? was she able to be up and about?”
“Yes, she was able to take carriage airings, and to be driven about in a small phaeton by the neatest whip in Europe.”