His Grace — page 99: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

HIS GRACE. 93 for me, thougn perhaps it would be unreasonable to expect that they should acquit me of stupidity. There is, no doubt, always a possibility, almost a probability, that when a young man and a young woman are thrown together from morning to night in a country house, they will end by falling in love with one another. I quite allow that; only I do think it was excessively improbable that the Duke of Hurstbourne should fall in love with my sister, or she with him. It was so absolutely out of the question that anything could come of it if they did, and so natural to assume that they must both be thoroughly aware of that! More- over, Nora was already betrothed to Mr. Burgess, and Hurstbourne knew it. Nevertheless, I ought to have had my wits about me, and I suppose, if I had been a woman, I should have had them about me; although I may plead, as some extenuation of my blindness, that Lady Charles Gas- coigne’s wits appeared to have gone wool-gathering. Lady Charles, I imagine, saw no more danger in her son’s intimate companionship with Nora than she would have seen in his making a friend of his grand- mother or of an infant: the one thing which impressed her most powerfully about him was that he was a duke: dukes, it is generally conceded, cannot contract matri- monial alliances with a class far beneath their own, and even if he did indulge in an occasional flirtation with some impossible person, he would be none the worse off for that. I am not sure that—supposing these to have been her sentiments—she would have been wrong: only it is obvious that my point of view was not, and could not be, identical with hers. So, if the reader pleases, I will write myself down an comicboo cS (eo) os |