"I wanted you to see the verses, and the manuscript being almost
illegible I had to copy it; so, in a mechanical mood, I copied the music
also. Please let me have them again. I feared they were not worth your
notice! I know it now."
Hester, however, would not yield the paper, but began again to read it:
Vavasor's writing, out of the bank, was one of those irritating hands
that wrong not only with the absence of legibility but with the show of
its presence, and she had not yet got so clear a notion of his verses as
a mere glance of them in print would have given her. Why she did not
quite like them she did not yet know, and was anxious not to be unfair.
That they were clever she did not doubt; they had for one thing his own
air of unassumed ease, and she could not but feel they had some claim to
literary art. This added a little to her hesitation, not in pronouncing
on them--she was far from that yet--but in recognizing what she felt
about them. Had she had a suspicion of the lie he had told her, and that
they were the work of yesterday, it would at once have put leagues
between them, and made the verses hateful to her.
Pages:
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198