"The very man!" said she, smiling.
"Then I am sure you are, as I should be, sadly mortified at his continuing these attentions."
"I don't see why I should be mortified," said she, "He may be, if he likes."
"You know what the poet says, Lulu, and it is excellent sense,—
'In part she is to blame that has been tried,
He comes too near that comes to be denied.'"
The crimson tide rippled over her forehead at this, but it was only a passing disturbance, and she answered sweetly,—
"I don't think you are quite fair," as if she had been playing at some game with me.
Apparently, too, she had as little religious as moral sense, though she called herself a member of the Church, and said she was confirmed at twelve years old.
But once, in speaking of Mr. Lewis's going to church, she told me, "William has no religion at all." Much in the same way she would have said he had not had luncheon. A strange responsibility, if he felt it, had this William, a man nearly forty years old, for this young creature not yet twenty-three, and with powers so undeveloped and a character so unbalanced!
In the ten days we passed together I often wished I could have known her early, or that I now had a right to say to her what I would. However, perhaps I overestimated the influence of outward circumstances.