One looks
too gentle and sweet to give any creature pain; I cherish her like a
tender plant; she deceives me for the coarsest fellow she can find.
Another comes the frank and candid dodge; she is so off-handed she shows
me it is not worth her while to betray. She deceives me, like the other,
and with as little discrimination. The next has a face of beaming
innocence, and a limpid eye that looks like transparent candor; she gazes
long and calmly in my face, as if her eye loved to dwell on me, gazes
with the eye of a gazelle or a young hare, and the baby lips below outlie
the hoariest male fox in the Old Jewry. But, to complete the delusion,
all my sweethearts and wives are romantic and poetical skin-deep--or they
would not attract me--and all turn out vulgar to the core. By their
lovers alone can you ever know them. By the men they can't love, and the
men they do love, you find these creatures that imitate sentiment so
divinely are hard, prosaic, vulgar little things, thinly gilt and double
varnished."
"They are much better than we are; but you don't know how to take them,"
said Severne, with the calm superiority of success.
"No," replied Vizard, dryly, "curse me if I do.
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