Margaret was quite confident by this that she had never believed
him--"not really, you know"--having argued the point out at some
length the night before, and reaching her conclusion by a course of
reasoning peculiar to herself.
Mr. Woods, as you may readily conceive, was sunk in the Slough of
Despond deeper than ever plummet sounded. Margaret thought this very
nice of him; it was a delicate tribute to her that he ate nothing;
and the fact that Hugh Van Orden and Petheridge Jukesbury--as she
believed--acted in precisely the same way for precisely the same
reason, merely demonstrated, of course, their overwhelming conceit and