The moment Miss
Liston was apprized of a possible romance, she began the study of
the protagonists. She was looking out, she told me, for some new
types (if it were any consolation--and there is a sort of dignity
about it--to be called a type, Miss Liston's victims were always
welcome to so much), and she had found them in Chillington and
Pamela. The former appeared to my dull eye to offer no salient
novelty; he was tall, broad, handsome, and he possessed a manner
of enviable placidity. Pamela, I allowed, was exactly the
heroine Miss Liston loved--haughty, capricious, difficile, but
sound and true at heart (I was mentally skimming Volume I). Miss
Liston agreed with me in my conception of Pamela, but declared
that I did not do justice to the artistic possibilities latent in
Chillington; he had a curious attraction which it would tax her
skill (so she gravely informed me) to the utmost to reproduce.
She proposed that I also should make a study of him, and
attributed my hurried refusal to a shrinking from the
difficulties of the task.
"Of course," she observed, looking at our young friends, who were
talking nonsense at the other side of the lawn, "they must have a
misunderstanding."
"Why, of course," said I, lighting my pipe. "What should you say
to another man?"
"Or another woman?" said Miss Liston.
"It comes to the same thing," said I. (About a volume and a half
I meant.
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