"May I venture to speak one word to you, Miss
Dodd?--one single word?"
She looked up surprised; and it was young Mr. Hardie.
His tall figure was bending towards her submissively, and his face, as
well as his utterance, betrayed considerable agitation.
And what led to so unusual a rencontre between a young gentleman and lady
who had never been introduced?
"The Tender Passion," says a reader of many novels.
Why, yes; the tenderest in all our nature:
Wounded Vanity.
Naturally proud and sensitive, and inflated by success and flattery,
Alfred Hardie had been torturing himself ever since he fled Edward's
female relations. He was mortified to the core. He confounded "the fools"
(his favourite synonym for his acquaintance) for going and calling Dodd's
mother an elder sister, and so not giving him a chance to divine her. And
then that he, who prided himself on his discrimination, should take them
for ladies of rank, or, at all events, of the highest fashion and, climax
of humiliation, that so great a man as he should go and seem to court
them by praising Dodd of Exeter, by enlarging upon Dodd of Exeter, by
offering to grind Logic with Dodd of Exeter.
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