Equally amazed and provoked, she disdainfully asked me what I knew of him?
I made no answer. I was not quite prepared for the interrogatory, and feared she might next inquire when and where I had seen him?
My silence was regarded as self-conviction of error, and she added, “I know you can’t not know him; I know he had never seen you two year and half ago; when you came here he had not heard your name.”
“Two years and a half,” I answered coolly, “I did not regard as a short time for forming a judgment of any one’s character.”
“When you don’t not see them? You have never seen him, I am sure, but once, or what you call twice.”
I did not dare let this pass, it was so very wide from the truth; but calmly said I had seen him much oftener than once or twice. “And where? when have you seen him?”
“Many times; and at Cheltenham constantly; but never to observe in him anything but honour and goodness.”
“O ver well! you don’t not know him like me, you can’t not know him; he is not from your acquaintance—I know that ver well!”
She presently went on by herself. “You could not know such a person—he told me the same himself: he told me he had not never seen you when you first came. You might see him at Cheltenham, that is true; but nothing others, I am sure. At Windsor there was no tea, not once, so you can’t not have seen him, only at Cheltenham.”
I hardly knew whether to laugh or be frightened at this width of error; nor, indeed, whether it was not all some artifice to draw me out, from pique, into some recital: at all events I thought it best to say nothing, for she was too affronting to deserve to be set right.