Oliver turned with disdain from Fan’s despairing warning: ‘Oliver, if you don’t take care, Mrs. Polley will think you are proposing to “keep company” with one of her girls, and if you don’t fulfil her expectations, she will set you down unhesitatingly and proclaim you openly to be “a flirty, shillyshallying fellow, who don’t know your own mind.” Are you such a greenhorn that you require to be told you cannot look twice at a girl of this stamp, or exchange three sentences with her, without the girl, or her parents for her, concluding that you mean something in the matrimonial line, and going on to class you as her admirer and suitor, and to calculate what sort of match you will make for her? As you are, undoubtedly, a great match in the Polleys’ eyes, you ought to behave with common prudence.’ ‘No, no!’ denied Oliver vehemently, blushing hotly with chivalrous pain. ‘You are aspersing your whole sex, Fan, in the persons of tradesmen’s daughters; and if there were any ground for the aspersion, it would be high time that it should be done away with, by the introduction of wider, simpler, more friendly intercourse between young men and women.’ ‘Perhaps you really mean to ally yourself with the family,’ said Fan in her vexation, falling into the offence which was unusual with her, of employing almost as tall language as ’Liza Polley might have adopted on a similar occasion. ‘To be perfectly consistent, you ought. All I ask is that you will tell me in time.’ ‘That you may carry off your goods and chattels before they are contaminated by coming in contact with Miss ’Liza’s or Miss ’Mily’s bridal finery, and renounce me as a brother before you are forced to own her as a sister,’ said Oliver, beginning to laugh. ‘All right. But I don’t own to the soft impeachment yet, though, if ever my time should come, why not a Miss Polley—I beg her pardon for the liberty taken with her name, but I did not begin the impertinence—why not a Miss Polley, I say, as well as another?’ Oliver spoke with light defiance but with some bitterness underlying his challenge, for his thoughts had gone back to an encounter that morning, when Catherine Hilliard, driving with her cousin, had passed him and his baker’s shop, literally with unseeing eyes. She had looked more delicate and tired out than ever. No wonder, when she was being not merely morally starved, but slowly poisoned in her Palace of Art, her fantastic ideal world.