The comparison is a coarse one, but he felt that he was taking the bull by the horns.

Angela Vivian stood watching him arrive.
"You did n't recognize me," he said, "and your not recognizing me made me--made me hesitate." For a moment she said nothing, and then-- "You are more timid than you used to be!" she answered.
He could hardly have said what expression he had expected to find in her face; his apprehension had, perhaps, not painted her obtrusively pale and haughty, aggressively cold and stern; but it had figured something different from the look he encountered.

Miss Vivian was simply blushing--that was what Bernard mainly perceived; he saw that her surprise had been extreme--complete.

Her blush was re-assuring; it contradicted the idea of impatient resentment, and Bernard took some satisfaction in noting that it was prolonged.
"Yes, I am more timid than I used to be," he said.
In spite of her blush, she continued to look at him very directly; but she had always done that--she always met one's eye; and Bernard now instantly found all the beauty that he had ever found before in her pure, unevasive glance.
"I don't know whether I am more brave," she said; "but I must tell the truth--I instantly recognized you." "You gave no sign!" "I supposed I gave a striking one--in getting up and going away." "Ah!" said Bernard, "as I say, I am more timid than I was, and I did n't venture to interpret that as a sign of recognition." "It was a sign of surprise." "Not of pleasure!" said Bernard.

He felt this to be a venturesome, and from the point of view of taste perhaps a reprehensible, remark; but he made it because he was now feeling his ground, and it seemed better to make it gravely than with assumed jocosity.
"Great surprises are to me never pleasures," Angela answered; "I am not fond of shocks of any kind.