They'll hunt languidly
and dress languidly and dine languidly and work without
enthusiasm and find it a bore to carry on three minutes'
conversation about anything whatever and yet, when the other sort
of conversation begins, they'll laugh. and wake up and throw
themselves about in their chairs. Then, if they so delight in the
narration, how is it possible that they can be offended--and
properly offended--at the suggestion that they might make
attempts upon your wife's honour? Or again: Edward Ashburnham
was the cleanest looking sort of chap;--an excellent magistrate, a
first rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they said, in
Hampshire, England. To the poor and to hopeless drunkards, as I
myself have witnessed, he was like a painstaking guardian. And
he never told a story that couldn't have gone into the columns of
the Field more than once or twice in all the nine years of my
knowing him. He didn't even like hearing them; he would fidget
and get up and go out to buy a cigar or something of that sort. You
would have said that he was just exactly the sort of chap that you
could have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine and it was
madness. And yet again you have me.
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