I will say, 'Why don't you marry Charlotte?
She 's a thousand times better than I.'" "You are wicked; you are changed!" cried her sister.
"If you don't like it you can prevent it," said Gertrude.

"You can prevent it by keeping him from speaking to me!" And with this she walked away, very conscious of what she had done; measuring it and finding a certain joy and a quickened sense of freedom in it.
Mr.Wentworth was rather wide of the mark in suspecting that Clifford had begun to pay unscrupulous compliments to his brilliant cousin; for the young man had really more scruples than he received credit for in his family.

He had a certain transparent shamefacedness which was in itself a proof that he was not at his ease in dissipation.

His collegiate peccadilloes had aroused a domestic murmur as disagreeable to the young man as the creaking of his boots would have been to a house-breaker.

Only, as the house-breaker would have simplified matters by removing his chaussures, it had seemed to Clifford that the shortest cut to comfortable relations with people--relations which should make him cease to think that when they spoke to him they meant something improving--was to renounce all ambition toward a nefarious development.
And, in fact, Clifford's ambition took the most commendable form.