knew her to be the heroine of the episode. What annoyed her most was
that Neigh could ever have looked upon her indiscretion as a humorous
incident, which he certainly must have done at some time or other to
account for his telling it. Had he been angry with her, or sneered at
her for going, she could have forgiven him; but to see her manoeuvre in
the light of a joke, to use it as illustrating his grim theory of
womankind, and neither to like nor to dislike her the more for it from
first to last, this was to treat her with a cynicism which was
intolerable. That Neigh's use of the incident as a stock anecdote ceased
long before he had decided to ask her to marry him she had no doubt, but
it showed that his love for her was of that sort in which passion makes
war upon judgment, and prevails in spite of will. Moreover, he might
have been speaking ironically when he alluded to the act as a virtue in a
woman, which seemed the more likely when she remembered his cool bearing
towards her in the drawing-room. Possibly it was an antipathetic
reaction, induced by the renewed recollection of her proceeding.

'I will never marry Mr. Neigh!' she said, with decision. 'That shall
settle it. You need not think over any such contingency, Picotee. He is
one of those horrid men who love with their eyes, the remainder part of
him objecting all the time to the feeling; and even if his objections
prove the weaker, and the man marries, his general nature conquers again
by the time the wedding trip is over, so that the woman is miserable at
last, and had better not have had him at all.'

'That applies still more to Lord Mountclere, to my thinking. I never saw
anything like the look of his eyes upon you.'

'O no, no--you understand nothing if you say that. But one thing be sure
of, there is no marriage likely to take place between myself and Mr.