"No"—laughing; "how I wish I could! It is your superiority frightens me. I hear I must look on you as something superlatively good."
"How shocking! And in what way am I supposed to excel my brethren?"
"In every way," with a good deal of malice: "I have been bred in the belief that you are a rara avis, a model, a——"
"Your teachers have done me a great injury. I shudder when I contemplate the bitter awakening you must have when you come to know me better."
"I hope so. I dare say"—naively—"I could learn to like you very well, if you proved on acquaintance a little less immaculate than I have been led to believe you."
"I shall instantly throw over my pronounced taste for the Christian virtues, and take steadily to vice," says Guy, with decision: "will that satisfy your ladyship?"
"Perhaps you put it a little too strongly," says Lilian, demurely. "By the bye"—irrelevantly,—"what business took you from home yesterday?"
"I have to beg your pardon for that,—my absence, I mean; but I could not help it. And it was scarcely business kept me absent," confesses Chetwoode, who, if he is anything, is strictly honest, "rather a promise to dine and sleep at some friends of ours, the Bellairs, who live a few miles from us."
"Then it wasn't really that bugbear, business? I begin to revive," says Miss Chesney.
"No; nothing half so healthy. I wish I had some more legitimate excuse to offer for my seeming want of courtesy than the fact of my having to attend a prosy dinner; but I haven't. I feel I deserve a censure, yet I hope you won't administer one when I tell you I found a very severe punishment in the dinner itself."