"My meaning is sufficiently clear, I should imagine," she retorts, with lady-like, gentle exasperation. "If you had left the girl in her original obscurity, it would have been all very well; but to be taken up and dropped again——"
"Like a hot chesnut!"
"Pshaw! to be taken up and dropped again is hardly pleasant."
"Hardly."
"And when you drop her——"
"Literally or metaphorically?—on the stone floor, or out of the light of my favour?"
"When you drop her" (disdaining to notice the interruption)——
"Well, what then?" he says, laying down the paper, and turning his face, kindled by a certain honest self-contempt, towards her—"To be dropped by me! what a prodigious calamity! Hitherto, Conny, your sex has made, with regard to me, more use of the active than the passive voice of the verb to drop."
"Nonsense!" she says, scornfully; "that is the pride that apes humility. Of course, so much notice as you lavish on her is likely to turn the head of a girl who has hitherto probably received no attentions more flattering than those of some Welsh grazier; and when you drop her——"
"When I drop her," he repeats, impatiently, tired of the subject, and of the repetition of the phrase—"she will be no worse off than she was before that misfortune happened to her."