ng herself in a French novel--Bernard could see it was a
French novel--he could not make out that she was the worse for it. It
had not affected her appearance; Miss Vivian was still a handsome girl.
Bernard hoped she would not look toward him or recognize him; he wished
to look at her at his ease; to think it over; to make up his mind. The
idea of meeting Angela Vivian again had often come into his thoughts;
I may, indeed, say that it was a tolerably familiar presence there; but
the fact, nevertheless, now presented itself with all the violence of an
accident for which he was totally unprepared. He had often asked himself
what he should say to her, how he should carry himself, and how he
should probably find the young lady; but, with whatever ingenuity he
might at the moment have answered these questions, his intelligence at
present felt decidedly overtaxed. She was a very pretty girl to whom he
had done a wrong; this was the final attitude into which, with a good
deal of preliminary shifting and wavering, she had settled in his
recollection. The wrong was a right, doubtless, from certain points of
view; but from the girl's own it could only seem an injury to which its
having been inflicted by a clever young man with whom she had been on
agreeable terms, necessarily added a touch of baseness.

In every disadvantage that a woman suffers at the hands of a man, there
is inevitably, in what concerns the man, an element of cowardice. When I
say "inevitably," I mean that this is what the woman sees in it. This is
what Bernard believed that Angela Vivian saw in the fact that by giving
his friend a bad account of her he had prevented her making an opulent
marriage. At first he had said to himself that, whether he had held
his tongue or spoken, she had already lost her chance; but with time,
somehow, this reflection had lost its weight in the scale. It conveyed
little re-assurance to his irritated conscience--it had become
imponderable and impertinent. At the moment of which I speak it entirely
failed to present itself, even for form's sake; and as he sat looking
at this superior creature who came back to him out of an episode of his
past, he thought of her simply as an unprotected woman toward whom he
had been indelicate. It is not an agreeable thing for a delicate man
like Bernard Longueville to have to accommodate himself to such an
accident, but this is nevertheless what it seemed needful that he should
do. If she bore him a