The reader may imagine whether
such an impression as this made it any more agreeable to Basil to have
to believe it would be indelicate in him to try to woo her. He would
have resented immensely the imputation that he had done anything of that
sort yet. "Ah, Miss Tarrant, my success in life is one thing--my
ambition is another!" he exclaimed presently, in answer to her inquiry.
"Nothing is more possible than that I may be poor and unheard of all my
days; and in that case no one but myself will know the visions of
greatness I have stifled and buried."
"Why do you talk of being poor and unheard of? Aren't you getting on
quite well in this city?"
This question of Verena's left him no time, or at least no coolness, to
remember that to Mrs. Luna and to Olive he had put a fine face on his
prospects, and that any impression the girl might have about them was
but the natural echo of what these ladies believed. It had to his ear
such a subtly mocking, defiant, unconsciously injurious quality, that
the only answer he could make to it seemed to him for the moment to be
an outstretched arm, which, passing round her waist, should draw her so
close to him as to enable him to give her a concise account of his
situation in the form of a deliberate kiss. If the moment I speak of had
lasted a few seconds longer I know not what monstrous proceeding of this
kind it would have been my difficult duty to describe; it was
fortunately arrested by the arrival of a nursery-maid pushing a
perambulator and accompanied by an infant who toddled in her wake.
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