[Sandra Belloni by George Meredith]@TWC D-Link book
Sandra Belloni

CHAPTER II
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A sentimentalism requires secresy.
I can enjoy it, and shall treat it respectfully if you will confide it to me alone; but I and my friends must laugh at it outright.
"Does there not seem a soul in the moonlight ?" for instance.

Arabella, after a rapturous glance at the rosy orb, put it to Mr.Pericles, in subdued impressive tones.

She had to repeat her phrase; Mr.Pericles then echoing, with provoking monotony of tone, "Sol ?"--whereupon "Soul!" was reiterated, somewhat sharply: and Mr.Pericles, peering over the collar of the bear, with half an eye, continued the sentence, in the manner of one sent thereby farther from its meaning: "Ze moonlight ?" Despairing and exasperated, Arabella commenced afresh: "I said, there seems a soul in it"; and Mr.Pericles assented bluntly: "In ze light!"-- which sounded so little satisfactory that Arabella explained, "I mean the aspect;" and having said three times distinctly what she meant, in answer to a terrific glare from the unsubmerged whites of the eyes of Mr.Pericles, this was his comment, almost roared forth: "Sol! you say so-whole--in ze moonlight--Luna?
Hein?
Ze aspect is of Sol!--Yez." And Mr.Pericles sank into his bear again, while Wilfrid Pole, who was swinging his long cavalry legs to rearward, shouted; and Mr.Sumner, a rising young barrister, walking beside Cornelia, smiled a smile of extreme rigidity.

Arabella was punished for claiming rights of birth.
She heard the murmuring course of the dialogue between Cornelia and Mr.
Sumner, sufficiently clear to tell her it was not fictitious and was well sustained, while her heart was kept thirsting for the key to it.
In advance were Adela and Edward Buxley, who was only a rich alderman's only son, but had the virtue of an extraordinary power of drawing caricatures, and was therefore useful in exaggerating the features of disagreeable people, and showing how odious they were: besides endearing pleasant ones exhibiting how comic they could be.

Gossips averred that before Mr.Pole had been worried by his daughters into giving that mighty sum for Brookfield, Arabella had accepted Edward as her suitor; but for some reason or other he had apparently fallen from his high estate.


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