There was no absolute means of knowing; but if offers were made they never transpired, and Mrs.Harris, far away in England, nourished a certainty that they never were made.

Speaking with her intimate knowledge of the sex she declared that Dora frightened the men, that her cleverness was of a kind to paralyze any sentiment of the sort that might be expected.
It depended upon Mrs.Harris's humour whether this was Dora's misfortune or her crime.

She, Dora, never frightened me, and by the time her cleverness dawned upon me, my sentiment about her had become too robust to be paralyzed.

On the contrary, the agreeable stimulus it gave me was one of the things I counted most valuable in my life out there.

It hardly mattered, however, that I should confess this; I was not a young man in Harris's department.