“And yet,” said Tom, “although I'm as good a friend as he has, I never quite got under his skin. There's some things I wouldn't talk to him about. I've learned that. I never told him, for instance, that I saw him out in a sleigh with you at the capital.”
“Oh,” said Victoria; and she added, “Is he ashamed of it?”
“It's not that,” replied Tom, hastily, “but I guess if he'd wanted me to know about it, he'd have told me.”
Victoria had begun to realize that, in the few minutes which had elapsed since she had found herself on the roadside, gazing up into young Tom's eyes, she had somehow become quite intimate with him.
“I fancy he would have told you all there was to tell about it—if the matter had occurred to him again,” she said, with the air of finally dismissing a subject already too prolonged. But Tom knew nothing of the shades and conventions of the art of conversation.
“He's never told me he knew you at all!” he exclaimed, staring at Victoria. Apparently some of the aspects of this now significant omission on Austen's part were beginning to dawn on Tom.
“It wasn't worth mentioning,” said Victoria, briefly, seeking for a pretext to change the subject.
“I don't believe that,” said Tom, “you can't expect me to sit here and look at you and believe that. How long has he known you?”
“I saw him once or twice last summer, at Leith,” said Victoria, now wavering between laughter and exasperation. She had got herself into a quandary indeed when she had to parry the appalling frankness of such inquiries.
“The more you see of him, the more you'll admire him, I'll prophesy,” said Tom. “If he'd been content to travel along the easy road, as most fellows are, he would have been counsel for the Northeastern. Instead of that—” here Tom halted abruptly, and turned scarlet: “I forgot,” he said, “I'm always putting my foot in it, with ladies.”