“Ah! so I thought. How many hours long, Miss—” (Vi he was going to say)—“Darkwell, are contained in half an hour’s waiting? The spirit of Mariana has come upon me:
‘She only said, “My life is dreary,”
“He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am a-weary, a-weary,
I would that I were dead!”’
Can’t you a little understand it, too?—not, of course, quite like me, but a little?”
Vi was not going to answer, but suddenly she changed her mind and said—
“I don’t know, but I think you were a great deal more agreeable when you were a schoolboy. I assure you, I’m serious. I think you’ve grown so tiresome and conceited. I suppose all young men in the universities are. ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing,’ you used to tell me, and I think I can now agree with you—at least it seems to make people vain and disagreeable.”
Maubray answered looking on her gently, but speaking as if in a pensive soliloquy, and wondering as he went along whether he had really turned into a coxcomb; for he was one of those sensitive, because diffident souls on whom the lightest reproof tells, and induces self-examination.
“I don’t know,” he said, “that I’ve even got the little learning that qualifies for danger. I don’t think I am vain—that is, not a bit vainer than I used to be; but I’m sure I’m more disagreeable—that is, to you. My babble and dull jokes are very well for a child, but the child has grown up, and left childish things behind: and a young lady in her teens is more fastidious, and—and, in fact, is a sort of an angel whom I am not formed to talk to with a chance of being anything but a bore. Very unlearned, and yet a book-worm; very young and yet not very merry; not a bad fellow, I think, and yet, with hardly a friend on earth, and—by Jove! here comes Trevor at last.”