hy laughed, "not to want to compromise
HER!"

"Oh Jane!" Mrs. Brookenham dropped. "DOES he like her?" she continued.
"You must know."

"Ah it's just my knowing that constitutes the beauty of my loyalty--of
my delicacy." He had his quick jumps too. "Am I never, never to see the
child?"

This enquiry appeared only to confirm his friend in the view of what was
touching in him. "You're the most delicate thing I know, and it crops up
with effect the oddest in the intervals of your corruption. Your talk's
half the time impossible; you respect neither age nor sex nor condition;
one doesn't know what you'll say or do next; and one has to return your
books--c'est tout dire--under cover of darkness. Yet there's in the
midst of all this and in the general abyss of you a little deepdown
delicious niceness, a sweet sensibility, that one has actually one's
self, shocked as one perpetually is at you, quite to hold one's breath
and stay one's hand for fear of ruffling or bruising. There's no one
in talk with whom," she balmily continued, "I find myself half so
often suddenly moved to pull up short. You've more little toes to tread
on--though you pretend you haven't: I mean morally speaking, don't you
know?--than even I have myself, and I've so many that I could wish most
of them cut off. You never spare me a shock--no, you don't do that: it
isn't the form your delicacy takes. But you'll know what I mean, all the
same, I think, when I tell you that there are lots I spare YOU!"

Mr. Mitchett fairly glowed with the candour of his attention. "Know what
you mean, dearest lady? How can a man handicapped to death, a man of
my origin, my appearance, my general weaknesses, drawbacks, immense
indebtedness, all round, for the start, as it were, that I feel my
friends have been so good as to allow me: how can such a man not be
conscious every moment that every one about him goes on tiptoe and winks
at every one else? What CAN you all mention in my presence, poor things,
that isn't personal?"

Mrs. Brookenham's face covered him for an instant as no painted
Madonna's had ever covered the little charge at the breast beneath it.
"And the finest thing of all in you is your beautiful, beautiful pride!
You're prouder than all of us put together." She checked a motion that
he had apparently meant as a protest--she went on with her muffled
wisdom. "There isn't a man but YOU whom Petherton wouldn't have made
vulgar. He isn't vulgar himself--at least n