he trouble to think about them.
Sometimes he insisted on being tender, and even this was not so bad as
she expected, at least for a few minutes at a time; she rather enjoyed
having her hand pressed so seriously, and his studied phrases amused
her. It was only when he wished the conversation to be brilliant and
intellectual, that he became intolerable; then she must entertain him,
must get up little repartees, must tell him lively anecdotes, which he
swallowed as a dog bolts a morsel, being at once ready for the next. He
never made a comment, of course, but at the height of his enjoyment he
gave a quick, short, stupid laugh, that so jarred upon her ears, she
would have liked to be struck deaf rather than hear it again.

At these times she thought of Malbone, how gifted he was, how
inexhaustible, how agreeable, with a faculty for happiness that would
have been almost provoking had it not been contagious. Then she looked
from her airy perch and smiled at him at the club-window, where he stood
in the most negligent of attitudes, and with every faculty strained in
observation. A moment and she was gone.

Then all was gone, and a mob of queens might have blocked the way,
without his caring to discuss their genealogies, even with old General
Le Breton, who had spent his best (or his worst) years abroad, and was
supposed to have been confidential adviser to most of the crowned heads
of Europe.

For the first time in his life Malbone found himself in the grasp of a
passion too strong to be delightful. For the first time his own heart
frightened him. He had sometimes feared that it was growing harder, but
now he discovered that it was not hard enough.

He knew it was not merely mercenary motives that had made Emilia accept
John Lambert; but what troubled him was a vague knowledge that it was
not mere pique. He was used to dealing with pique in women, and had
found it the most manageable of weaknesses. It was an element of
spasmodic conscience than he saw here, and it troubled him.

Something told him that she had said to herself: "I will be married,
and thus do my duty to Hope. Other girls marry persons whom they do not
love, and it helps them to forget. Perhaps it will help me. This is a
good man, they say, and I think he loves me."

"Think?" John Lambert had adored her when she had passed by him without
looking at him; and now when the thought came over him that she would be
his wife, he became stupid with bliss. And as l