It is enough you affronted me with
that before Lady Clementina--and after foolish boasts on my part
of your good breeding! Now you bring it up again, when I cannot
escape your low talk!"
"My lady, I am sorrier than you think; but which is worse--that
you should hear such a thing spoken of, or make a friend of the
man who did it--and that is Lord Liftore?"
Florimel turned away, and gave her seeming attention to the moonlit
waters, sweeping past the swift sailing cutter.
Malcolm's heart ached for her: he thought she was deeply troubled.
But she was not half so shocked as he imagined. Infinitely worse
would have been the shock to him could he have seen how little the
charge against Liftore had touched her. Alas! evil communications
had already in no small degree corrupted her good manners. Lady
Bellair had uttered no bad words in her hearing: had softened to
decency every story that required it; had not unfrequently tacked
a worldly wise moral to the end of one; and yet, and yet, such had
been the tone of her telling, such the allotment of laughter and
lamentation, such the acceptance of things as necessary, and such
the repudiation of things as Quixotic, puritanical, impossible,
that the girl's natural notions of the lovely and the clean had
got dismally shaken and confused.
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