"I don't know," she rejoins, with a certain air of doubtful reserve.
"It is generally considered pleasanter to have two legs to go upon than one, isn't it? It is not many people that, like Cleopatra, can 'hop forty paces through the public streets.' Have you any reason for imputing to Miss Craven a morbid taste for invalidhood?"
"No; but she is hardly an invalid, and to be made so much of as you, with your usual good-nature to the waifs and strays of humanity, make of her, must be a sensation as pleasant as novel."
"I am wonderfully good-natured, aren't I?" he says, laughing broadly to himself behind the little yellowy sheets of the Pall Mall. "There is not one man in a hundred that, in my place, would do the same, is there?"
She is silent; the resentment of a slow nature, that has a suspicion of being laughed at, but is not sure of it, smouldering within her.
"Come, Conny, you began a sentence just now which you left unfinished, like a pig with one ear. 'If it is really an object to Miss Craven to get well'—what then?"
"If it is really an object to Miss Craven to get well, I should think that she would be more likely to attain it by lying quietly upstairs than by being continually moved from place to place; that is what I was going to say."
"I am sorry you think me such an Orson as to rush up and downstairs with such tremendous violence as to run the risk of dislocating her limbs."
Miss Blessington turns away pettishly.
"I wonder the girl likes to give you the trouble of perpetually carrying her about the house."