This staggers him.
"You must find me a very monotonous person if I say only one thing to you always."
"I haven't found you so."
"Then it—whatever it is—must be one of the most eloquent and remarkable speeches upon record. Do tell it to me."
"Look here, Monica," says Mr. Desmond, cautiously evading a reply: "what I want to know is—what you see in Ryde. He is tall, certainly, but he is fat and effeminate, with 'a forehead villanous low.'"
"Your own is very low," says Miss Beresford.
"If I thought it was like his, I'd make away with myself. And you listen to all his stories, and believe them every one. I don't believe a single syllable he says: I never met such a bragger. To listen to him, one would think he had killed every tiger in Bengal. In my opinion, he never even saw one."
"'Les absents ont toujours tort,'" quotes she, in a low, significant tone.
This is the finishing stroke.
"Oh! you defend him," he says, as savagely almost as one of those wild beasts he has just mentioned. "In your eyes he is a hero, no doubt. I daresay all women see virtue in a man who 'talks as familiarly of roaring lions as maids of thirteen do of puppy-dogs.'"