mind Georgie and Octavius. They're not your sort. You were saying
how you felt about it, and that's more interesting. Interests me more!"
Conceive that at this point the lady glanced at the speaker ever so
slightly. Upon which he followed a slight pause with:--"Yes, why are you
a _prig_, as she thought fit to put it?"

"Because I told her that if ever I found a young man who suited me--and
_vice versa_--and it got to ... to what you called just now
'kissing-point,' I should not be so ready as she had been to pull him
off like an old glove and throw him away. That was when I was very
young, you know. It was just after she jilted Ludwig, who afterwards
married my sister Lilian--Baroness Porchammer; my eldest sister...."

"Oh, _she_ jilted Ludwig, and _he_ married your sister Lilian, was that
it?" Mr. Pellew, still stroking that right whisker thoughtfully, was
preoccupied by something that diverted interest from this family
history.

Aunt Constance did not seem to notice his abstraction, but talked on.
"Yes--and what is so funny about Georgie with Julius is that they don't
seem to mind kissing now from a new standpoint. Georgie particularly. In
fact, I've seen her kiss him on both sides and call him an old stupid.
However, as you say, the cases are not alike. Perhaps if Philippa's old
love had married her sister--Lady Clancarrock of Garter, you
know--instead of Uncle Cosmo, as they call him, they could have got used
to it, by now. Only one must look at these things from one's own point
of view, and by the light of one's experience." A ring on her right hand
might have been one of the things, and the sun-ray through the
blind-slip the light of her experience, as she sat accommodating the
flash-light of the first to the gleam of the second.

If everyone knew to a nicety his or her seeming at the precise point of
utterance of any speech, slight or weighty, nine-tenths of our wit or
profundity would remain unspoken. Man always credits woman with knowing
exactly what she looks like, and engineering speech and seeming towards
the one desired end of impressing him--important Him! He acquits himself
of studying the subject! Probably he and she are, as a matter of fact,
six of the one and half a dozen of the other. Of this one thing the
story feels certain, that had Miss Dickenson been conscious of her
neighbour's incorporation into a unit of magnetism--he being its
victim--of her mere outward show in the evening light with the