"If it is really an object to Miss Craven to get well, I should think that she would be more likely to attain it by lying quietly upstairs than by being continually moved from place to place; _that_ is what I was going to say." "I am sorry you think me such an Orson as to rush up and downstairs with such tremendous violence as to run the risk of dislocating her limbs." Miss Blessington turns away pettishly. "I wonder the girl likes to give you the trouble of perpetually carrying her about the house." "She is well aware that trouble is a pleasure." "Fully half her day is spent on the staircase and in the passages in your arms." "What a horribly immoral picture--vice stalking rampant through the Felton corridors in the shape of me carrying a poor lame child that cannot carry herself!" "It may be a pleasure to you," says Constance, harking back to her former speech, "but it can hardly be so to her--to be haled about like a bale of goods by a total stranger like yourself. If you were her brother, I grant you, it would be different." "If I were her brother it _would_ be different," assents Gerard, blandly. The sentence is Miss Blessington's own, and yet, by fresh accentuation, it is made exactly to contradict itself. "You mean it good-naturedly, I don't doubt, but I am not at all sure that it is not mistaken kindness." "That _what_ is not mistaken kindness?" "You are very dull of comprehension this morning, St. John." "I always am at these untimely hours; it requires the flame of evening to light up the torch of my intellect. Be lenient to my infirmities, and explain; I am all attention." "My meaning is sufficiently clear, I should imagine," she retorts, with lady-like, gentle exasperation. "If you had left the girl in her original obscurity, it would have been all very well; but to be taken up and dropped again----" "Like a hot chesnut!" "Pshaw! to be taken up and dropped again is hardly pleasant." "Hardly." "And when you drop her----" "Literally or metaphorically?--on the stone floor, or out of the light of my favour?" "When you drop her" (disdaining to notice the interruption)---- "Well, what then?" he says, laying down the paper, and turning his face, kindled by a certain honest self-contempt, towards her--"To be dropped by me! what a prodigious calamity! Hitherto, Conny, your sex has made, with regard to me, more use of the active than the passive voice of the verb to drop." "Nonsense!" she says, scornfully; "that _is_ the pride that apes humility. Of course, so much notice as you lavish on her is likely to turn the head of a girl who has hitherto probably received no attentions more flattering than those of some Welsh grazier; and when you drop her----" "When I drop her," he repeats, impatiently, tired of the subject, and of the repetition of the phrase--"she will be no worse off than she was before that misfortune happened to her."