'Yes, a little. I daresay it will be some time before it gets all right. But you've no internal injuries or broken bones, and that's the great thing.' The last statement was made so effusively that it was not difficult for me to gather that my face was more deeply injured than he liked to admit. 'I know quite well,' said I composedly, 'that I shall have to swell the proud ranks of the plain after this; I must cultivate my intellect and my virtues, like the poor girls whom we don't dance with! I've lost a finger, too, haven't I? On my right hand?' 'Only two joints of it,' answered Edgar, with laboured cheerfulness. 'What would poor Helen say to me if she could see me now?' I suggested, rather diffidently. 'Say! Why, what every true woman would say, that she loved you ten times better now you were disfigured than she did when you were the counterpart of every other good-looking popinjay in town!' This, uttered with much ponderous vehemence, was by no means reassuring to me. In the first place, it confirmed the idea that my injuries would leave permanent marks. In the second place, it led me to ask myself whether, Helen's chief merit in my eyes having been good looks, my chief merit in her eyes might not have been the same. As I said nothing, Edgar, now fully awake, came nearer to the bed, and said solemnly: 'You do Helen injustice, Harry.' 'And you taught me to do her injustice, Edgar.' At first he said nothing to this, and I knew that he understood me. But presently I felt his hand laid emphatically on my left shoulder, and he began in a low earnest voice: 'Look here, old chap, that's not quite fair. I may have inveighed against the intellectual inferiority of women scores of times when you encouraged me by feeble protest. I may have spoken of my own sister as an example of the sweet and silly. When you saw her and became infatuated about her I listened to your rhapsodies in silence because I couldn't endorse your opinion that she was an angel. But I was glad you had taken a fancy to the child, and I knew that you might have done much worse. Well, my opinions have undergone no transformation. The women of the middle class, whom it is now the fashion to educate, the women of the lower class, who have to work, may be considered as reasoning creatures, varying, as men do, in their reasoning powers. But the women of the upper classes, _pur sang_, who are equally above education and labour, may be ranked all together, with the exception of those whom alliance with the class below has regenerated, as more or less fascinating idiots, whose minds are cramped by unnatural and ignorant prejudices, and in whom an occasional ray of intelligence disperses itself in mere freaks of art, of philanthropy, or of religion.' 'Then, if you are logical, you may end by marrying a barmaid.'