"Ah don't
be so charming to me!--for it makes us intimate, and after all what
IS between us when I've been so tremendously on my guard and have
seen you but half a dozen times?" He recognised once more the
perverse law that so inveterately governed his poor personal
aspects: it would be exactly LIKE the way things always turned out
for him that he should affect Mrs. Pocock and Waymarsh as launched
in a relation in which he had really never been launched at all.
They were at this very moment--they could only be--attributing to
him the full licence of it, and all by the operation of her own
tone with him; whereas his sole licence had been to cling with
intensity to the brink, not to dip so much as a toe into the flood.
But the flicker of his fear on this occasion was not, as may be
added, to repeat itself; it sprang up, for its moment, only to die
down and then go out for ever. To meet his fellow visitor's
invocation and, with Sarah's brilliant eyes on him, answer, WAS
quite sufficiently to step into her boat. During the rest of the
time her visit lasted he felt himself proceed to each of the proper
offices, successively, for helping to keep the adventurous skiff
afloat. It rocked beneath him, but he settled himself in his place.
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