“You are crying, child!”
“Oh, no, sir.”
She gets up and hurries away.
“O Heavens!” Bertram says to himself. “One does not go to that sturdy class to get a sensitive plant that droops at a touch. She says liberry and umberellar. It is absurd that such a trifle should irritate one, but it does; it is like a grain of dust in one’s eye, a crumb of bread in one’s sock. What atoms they are, yet how miserable they can make one! And then her absolute inability to understand one! Love! Good gracious! She would want to have a bride cake from Gunter’s; a temple of Hymen in spun sugar!”
The remembrance of Cicely Seymour’s fair face, with its tender, dreamy eyes and its beautiful mouth, comes over him. He shivers in the warmth of the pleasant and unusual sunshine.
Marlow, who has left the ladies after his snubbing, passes him again, puts his glass in his eye, and gazes after Annie Brown.
“A protégée? Younger than your disciples usually are,” he remarks. “Ah, to be sure—that must be the Annie of the violets? My dear Bertram, surely chivalry should suggest that we should carry her baskets for her? If you will take the one, I will take the other.”
Bertram deigns no answer. He feels considerably annoyed, and gazes at the cupola of the hotel in front of him.
Marlow digs holes in the gravel with his cane.
“What an opportunity lost of practical illustration of your doctrines, and—she’s got a smart pair of ankles; rather thick, but still——”