'Then they think me unfit to associate with them? She--Adela will
look upon me as a vile creature! But it wasn't so when I saw her
immediately after my illness. She talked freely and with just the
same friendliness as before.'
'Probably she had heard nothing then.'
'And her mother only began to poison her mind when it was
advantageous to do so?'
Hubert laughed bitterly.
'Well, there is an end of it,' he pursued. 'Yes, I was forgetting
all that. Oh, it is quite intelligible; I don't blame them. By all
means let her be preserved from contagion! Pooh! I don't know my own
mind. Old fancies that I used to have somehow got hold of me again
If I ever marry, it must be a woman of the world, a woman with brain
and heart to judge human nature. It is gone, as if I had never had
such a thought. Poor child, to be sure; but that's all one can say.'
His tone was. as far from petulance as could be. Hubert's emotions
were never feebly coloured; his nature ran into extremes, and
vehemence of scorn was in him the true voice of injured tenderness.
Of humility he knew but little, least of all where his affections
were concerned, but there was the ring of noble metal in his
self-assertion. He would never consciously act or speak a falsehood,
and was intolerant of the lies, petty or great, which
conventionality and warped habits of thought encourage in those of
weaker personality.
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