"She is well aware that trouble is a pleasure."
"Fully half her day is spent on the staircase and in the passages in your arms."
"What a horribly immoral picture—vice stalking rampant through the Felton corridors in the shape of me carrying a poor lame child that cannot carry herself!"
"It may be a pleasure to you," says Constance, harking back to her former speech, "but it can hardly be so to her—to be haled about like a bale of goods by a total stranger like yourself. If you were her brother, I grant you, it would be different."
"If I were her brother it would be different," assents Gerard, blandly.
The sentence is Miss Blessington's own, and yet, by fresh accentuation, it is made exactly to contradict itself.
"You mean it good-naturedly, I don't doubt, but I am not at all sure that it is not mistaken kindness."
"That what is not mistaken kindness?"
"You are very dull of comprehension this morning, St. John."
"I always am at these untimely hours; it requires the flame of evening to light up the torch of my intellect. Be lenient to my infirmities, and explain; I am all attention."