"My new eye is to be in before Christmas, and my new leg after the new year, and my shoulder gets straighter every day!"
Nina laughed—.
"Real love would be—I suppose—if you could make her adore you before you looked any handsomer!"
And this sentence of Nina's rang in my ears long after she had gone, and often in the night. I could not sleep, I felt something had happened and that fate might be going to take Miss Sharp—Alathea—from me—.
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And then before morning in fretful dreams I seemed to be obsessed by the cooing of love words between a woman and a child—.
XI
Monday was a perfectly impossible day—I spent all the morning before I returned to Versailles in writing to Maurice, telling him he must find out all about Miss Sharp—Alathea—I felt if I told him her Christian name it would be a clue—and yet even to assist in that, which was, at the moment, my heart's desire, I could not overcome my personal dislike to pronounce it to Maurice!—it seemed as something sacred to me alone—which makes me reflect upon how egotistical we all are—and how we would all rather fail in attaining what is our greatest wish than not to be able to express our own personality—!