g with a
pasteboard Jim Crow. If you were to have a frank explanation with her,
Blanche would very soon throw Jim Crow out of the window. I very humbly
entreat you to cease thinking of me. I don't know what wrong you have
ever done me, or what kindness I have ever done you, that you should
feel obliged to trouble your head about me. You see all I am--I tell you
now. I am nothing in the least remarkable. As for your thinking ill of
me at Baden, I never knew it nor cared about it. If it had been so, you
see how I should have got over it. Dear Mr. Wright, we might be such
good friends, if you would only believe me. She 's so pretty, so
charming, so universally admired. You said just now you had bored me,
but it 's nothing--in spite of all the compliments you have paid me--to
the way I have bored you. If she could only know it--that I have bored
you! Let her see for half an hour that I am out of your mind--the rest
will take care of itself. She might so easily have made a quarrel with
me. The way she has behaved to me is one of the prettiest things I have
ever seen, and you shall see the way I shall always behave to her! Don't
think it necessary to say out of politeness that I have not bored you;
it is not in the least necessary. You know perfectly well that you are
disappointed in the charm of my society. And I have done my best, too.
I can honestly affirm that!' For some time he said nothing, and then he
remarked that I was very clever, but he did n't see a word of sense
in what I said. 'It only proves,' I said, 'that the merit of my
conversation is smaller than you had taken it into your head to fancy.
But I have done you good, all the same. Don't contradict me; you don't
know yet; and it 's too late for us to argue about it. You will tell me
to-morrow.'"

CHAPTER XXX

Some three evenings after he received this last report of the progress
of affairs in Paris, Bernard, upon whom the burden of exile sat none the
more lightly as the days went on, turned out of the Strand into one of
the theatres. He had been gloomily pushing his way through the various
London densities--the November fog, the nocturnal darkness, the jostling
crowd. He was too restless to do anything but walk, and he had been
saying to himself, for the thousandth time, that if he had been guilty
of a misdemeanor in succumbing to the attractions of the admirable girl
who showed to such advantage in letters of twelve pages, his fault was
richly expi