Otherwise--except for anything BUT that--I'd rather brazen it out as myself." There fell between them on this a silence of some minutes, after which it would probably not have been possible for either to say if their eyes had met while it lasted.

This was at any rate not the case as Vanderbank at last remarked: "Your brass, my dear young lady, is pure gold!" "Then it's of me, I think, that Harold ought to borrow." "You mean therefore that mine isn't ?" Vanderbank went on.
"Well, you really haven't any natural 'cheek'-- not like SOME of them.
You're in yourself as uneasy, if anything's said and every one giggles or makes some face, as Mr.Longdon, and if Lord Petherton hadn't once told me that a man hates almost as much to be called modest as a woman does, I'd say that very often in London now you must pass some bad moments." The present might precisely have been one of them, we should doubtless have gathered, had we seen fully recorded in Vanderbank's face the degree to which this prompt response embarrassed or at least stupefied him.

But he could always provisionally laugh.

"I like your 'in London now'!" "It's the tone and the current and the effect of all the others that push you along," she went on as if she hadn't heard him.

"If such things are contagious, as every one says, you prove it perhaps as much as any one.