Who
was he, after all, that he should imagine that he had won on his
personal merits a girl like Elizabeth Boyd?
He had the not very common type of mind that perceives the merit
in others more readily than their faults, and in himself the
faults more readily than the merit. Time and the society of a
great number of men of different ranks and natures had rid him of
the outer symbol of this type of mind, which is shyness, but it
had left him still unconvinced that he amounted to anything very
much as an individual.
This was the thought that met him every time he tried to persuade
himself that what Claire had said was ridiculous, the mere parting
shaft of an angry woman. With this thought as an ally her words
took on a plausibility hard to withstand. Plausible! That was the
devil of it. By no effort could he blind himself to the fact that
they were that. In the light of Claire's insinuations what had
seemed coincidences took on a more sinister character. It had
seemed to him an odd and lucky chance that Nutty Boyd should have
come to the rooms which he was occupying that night, seeking a
companion. Had it been chance? Even at the time he had thought it
strange that, on the strength of a single evening spent together,
Nutty should have invited a total stranger to make an indefinite
visit to his home.
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