She was occasionally worried, however this might be, by the impression
that these sacrifices, great as they were, were nothing to those that
his own passion had imposed; if indeed it was not rather the passion of
his confederate, which had caught him up and was whirling him round
like a great steam-wheel. He was at any rate in the strong grip of a
dizzy splendid fate; the wild wind of his life blew him straight before
it. Didn’t she catch in his face at times, even through his smile and
his happy habit, the gleam of that pale glare with which a bewildered
victim appeals, as he passes, to some pair of pitying eyes? He perhaps
didn’t even himself know how scared he was; but _she_ knew. They were
in danger, they were in danger, Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen: it
beat every novel in the shop. She thought of Mr. Mudge and his safe
sentiment; she thought of herself and blushed even more for her tepid
response to it. It was a comfort to her at such moments to feel that in
another relation—a relation supplying that affinity with her nature
that Mr. Mudge, deluded creature, would never supply—she should have
been no more tepid than her ladyship. Her deepest soundings were on two
or three occasions of finding herself almost sure that, if she dared,
her ladyship’s lover would have gathered relief from “speaking” to her.
She literally fancied once or twice that, projected as he was toward
his doom, her own eyes struck him, while the air roared in his ears, as
the one pitying pair in the crowd. But how could he speak to her while
she sat sandwiched there between the counter-clerk and the sounder?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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