"I can imagine that."
"She spoke of you——"
"Oh, she did! I thought you denied it."
"She did not speak in the way you fancy; but I asked her, and I would make her tell me what she thought of you, or rather how she felt towards you. I wanted to know; I had long wanted to know."
"So had I; but let us hear. She thinks meanly, she feels contemptuously, doubtless?"
"She thinks of you almost as highly as a woman can think of a man. You know she can be eloquent. I yet feel in fancy the glow of the language in which her opinion was conveyed."
"But how does she feel?"
"Till you shocked her (she said you had shocked her, but she would not tell me how) she felt as a sister feels towards a brother of whom she is at once fond and proud."
"I'll shock her no more, Cary, for the shock rebounded on myself till I staggered again. But that comparison about sister and brother is all nonsense. She is too rich and proud to entertain fraternal sentiments for me."
"You don't know her, Robert; and, somehow, I fancy now (I had other ideas formerly) that you cannot know her. You and she are not so constructed as to be able thoroughly to understand each other."