u.

Miss N. To pursue me; and if they find me alone, by chance to compliment
me with such speeches as you make? That would be pleasure indeed! Answer
me here in return, Clive. Have I ever disguised from any of my friends
the regard I have for you? Why should I? Have not I taken your part when
you were maligned? In former days, when--when Lord Kew asked me, as
he had a right to do then--I said it was as a brother I held you; and
always would. If I have been wrong, it has been for two or three times
in seeing you at all--or seeing you thus; in letting you speak to me as
you do--injure me as you do. Do you think I have not hard enough words
said to me about you, but that you must attack me too in turn? Last
night only, because you were at the ball,--it was very, very wrong of
me to tell you I was going there,--as we went home, Lady Kew--Go, sir. I
never thought you would have seen in me this humiliation.

Clive. Is it possible that I should have made Ethel Newcome shed tears?
Oh, dry them, dry them. Forgive me, Ethel, forgive me! I have no right
to jealousy, or to reproach you--I know that. If others admire you,
surely I ought to know that they--they do but as I do: I should be
proud, not angry, that they admire my Ethel--my sister, if you can be no
more.

Ethel. I will be that always, whatever harsh things you think or say of
me. There, sir, I am not going to be so foolish as to cry again. Have
you been studying very hard? Are your pictures good at the Exhibition?
I like you with your mustachios best, and order you not to cut them off
again. The young men here wear them. I hardly knew Charles Beardmore
when he arrived from Berlin the other day, like a sapper and miner. His
little sisters cried out, and were quite frightened by his apparition.
Why are you not in diplomacy? That day, at Brighton, when Lord Farintosh
asked whether you were in the army, I thought to myself, why is he not?

Clive. A man in the army may pretend to anything, n'est-ce pas? He wears
a lovely uniform. He may be a General, a K.C.B., a Viscount, an Earl. He
may be valiant in arms, and wanting a leg, like the lover in the song.
It is peace-time, you say? so much the worse career for a soldier. My
father would not have me, he said, for ever dangling in barracks, or
smoking in country billiard-rooms. I have no taste for law: and as for
diplomacy, I have no relations in the Cabinet, and no uncles in the
House of Peers. Could my uncle, who is in Parlia