Cora was on guard at once. But she was able to make clear that whatever he might have to say to her, she was prepared to listen.
"I've been thinking a goodish bit," said Henry Harper, with a quaint stiffening of manner as the gruff words found a way out of him, "about that talk we had the last time I come here."
Miss Dobbs listened with eyes half shut. Her face was a mask.
"I don't pretend to know much about what's due to ladies," he said, after a pause so long and so trying that it seemed to hypnotize him. "I've not mixed much in Society"—W. M. Thackeray, in whose works he was now taking so much interest, had a great belief in Society—"but I should like to do what's straight."
Silence still seemed the part of wisdom for Miss Dobbs.
"If I've done wrong, I'm sorry." There was another very awkward pause to navigate. "But I didn't see no harm in what I've done, and that's the truth."
A very slight sniff from Miss Dobbs ... a very slight sniff and nothing more.
"If I never speak again, Miss Cora, it's a solemn fact."
The sniff grew slightly more pronounced.
"If I had known a bit more about Society, I might not have come here quite so often."