llant
gentleman for a neighbour. No visitors will be admitted, General Ople, so
you are bare-throated only to me: sit quietly. One day you speculated on
the paint in my cheeks for the space of a minute and a half:--I had said
that I freckled easily. Your look signified that you really could not
detect a single freckle for the paint. I forgave you, or I did not. But
when I found you, on closer acquaintance, as indifferent to your
daughter's happiness as you had been to her reputation . . .'

'My daughter! her reputation! her happiness!'

General Ople raised his eyes under a wave, half uttering the outcries.

'So indifferent to her reputation, that you allowed a young man to talk
with her over the wall, and meet her by appointment: so reckless of the
girl's happiness, that when I tried to bring you to a treaty, on her
behalf, you could not be dragged from thinking of yourself and your own
affair. When I found that, perhaps I was predisposed to give you some of
what my sisters used to call my spice. You would not honestly state the
proportions of your income, and you affected to be faithful to the woman
of seventy. Most preposterous! Could any caricature of mine exceed in
grotesqueness your sketch of yourself? You are a brave and a generous man
all the same: and I suspect it is more hoodwinking than egotism--or
extreme egotism--that blinds you. A certain amount you must have to be a
man. You did not like my paint, still less did you like my sincerity; you
were annoyed by my corrections of your habits of speech; you were
horrified by the age of seventy, and you were credulous--General Ople,
listen to me, and remember that you have no collar on--you were credulous
of my statement of my great age, or you chose to be so, or chose to seem
so, because I had brushed your cat's coat against the fur. And then, full
of yourself, not thinking of Elizabeth, but to withdraw in the chivalrous
attitude of the man true to his word to the old woman, only stickling to
bring a certain independence to the common stock, because--I quote you!
and you have no collar on, mind--"you could not be at your wife's mercy,"
you broke from your proposal on the money question. Where was your
consideration for Elizabeth then?

'Well, General, you were fond of thinking of yourself, and I thought I
would assist you. I gave you plenty of subject matter. I will not say I
meant to work a homoeopathic cure. But if I drive you to forget your
collar, is it or i