"
He shifted in his chair and grunted. "Be it so, then," he snapped. "We
will deal with the qualities that already he displays." And Sir John
enumerated them.
"But this is no more than your judgment of him--no more than what you
think him."
"'Tis what all the world thinks him."
"But I shall not marry a man for what others think of him, but for what
I think of him myself. And in my view you cruelly malign him. I
discover no such qualities in Sir Oliver."
"'Tis that you should be spared such a discovery that I am beseeching
you not to wed him."
"Yet unless I wed him I shall never make such a discovery; and until I
make it I shall ever continue to love him and to desire to wed him. Is
all my life to be spent so?" She laughed outright, and came to stand
beside him. She put an arm about his neck as she might have put it
about the neck of her father, as she had been in the habit of doing any
day in these past ten years--and thereby made him feel himself to have
reached an unconscionable age. With her hand she rubbed his brow.
"Why, here are wicked wrinkles of ill-humour," she cried to him. "You
are all undone, and by a woman's wit, and you do not like it."
"I am undone by a woman's wilfulness, by a woman's headstrong resolve
not to see."
"You have naught to show me, Sir John."
"Naught? Is all that I have said naught?"
"Words are not things; judgments are not facts.
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