“Why, had I been Nero himself, I could not have tormented a being inoffensive as a shadow.”
I smiled; but I also hushed a groan. Oh!—I just wished he would let me alone—cease allusion to me. These epithets—these attributes I put from me. His “quiet Lucy Snowe,” his “inoffensive shadow,” I gave him back; not with scorn, but with extreme weariness: theirs was the coldness and the pressure of lead; let him whelm me with no such weight. Happily, he was soon on another theme.
“On what terms were ‘little Polly’ and I? Unless my recollections deceive me, we were not foes—”
“You speak very vaguely. Do you think little Polly’s memory, not more definite?”
“Oh! we don’t talk of ‘little Polly’ now. Pray say, Miss de Bassompierre; and, of course, such a stately personage remembers nothing of Bretton. Look at her large eyes, Lucy; can they read a word in the page of memory? Are they the same which I used to direct to a horn-book? She does not know that I partly taught her to read.”
“In the Bible on Sunday nights?”
“She has a calm, delicate, rather fine profile now: once what a little restless, anxious countenance was hers! What a thing is a child’s preference—what a bubble! Would you believe it? that lady was fond of me!”
“I think she was in some measure fond of you,” said I, moderately.
“You don’t remember then? I had forgotten; but I remember now. She liked me the best of whatever there was at Bretton.”
“You thought so.”