However, my lord, nothing daunted, expressed himself monstrously glad to
hear it; monstrously glad. And after looking about him and humming and
hawing, 'Won't you sit?' he said, with a killing glance.
'I am leaving immediately,' Julia answered, and declined with coldness
the chair which he pushed forward. At another time his foppish dress
might have moved her to smiles, or his feebleness and vapid oaths to
pity. This morning she needed her pity for herself, and was in no
smiling mood. Her world had crashed around her; she would sit and weep
among the ruins, and this butterfly insect flitted between. After a
moment, as he did not speak, 'I will not detain your lordship,' she
continued, curtseying frigidly.
'Cruel beauty!' my lord answered, dropping his hat and clasping his
hands in an attitude. And then, to her astonishment, 'Look, ma'am,' he
cried with animation, 'look, I beseech you, on the least worthy of your
admirers and deign to listen to him. Listen to him while--and don't, oh,
I say, don't stare at me like that,' he continued hurriedly,
plaintiveness suddenly taking the place of grandiloquence. 'I vow and
protest I am in earnest.' 'Then you must be mad!' Julia cried in great wrath. 'You can have no
other excuse, sir, for talking to me like that!' 'Excuse!' he cried rapturously. 'Your eyes are my excuse, your lips,
your shape! Whom would they not madden, ma'am? Whom would they not
charm--insanitate--intoxicate? What man of sensibility, seeing them at
an immeasurable distance, would not hasten to lay his homage at the feet
of so divine, so perfect a creature, whom even to see is to taste of
bliss! Deign, madam, to--Oh, I say, you don't mean to say you are really
of--offended?' Lord Almeric stuttered in amazement, again falling
lamentably from the standard of address which he had conned while his
man was shaving him. 'You--you--look here--' 'You must be mad!' Julia cried, her eyes flashing lightning on the
unhappy beau. 'If you do not leave me, I will call for some one to put
you out! How dare you insult me? If there were a bell I could reach--' Lord Almeric stared in the utmost perplexity; and fallen from his high
horse, alighted on a kind of dignity. 'Madam,' he said with a little bow
and a strut, ''tis the first time an offer of marriage from one of my
family has been called an insult! And I don't understand it. Hang me! If
we have married fools, we have married high!' It was Julia's turn to be overwhelmed with confusion. Having nothing
less in her mind than marriage, and least of all an offer of marriage
from such a person, she had set down all he had said to impudence and
her unguarded situation. Apprised of his meaning, she experienced a
degree of shame, and muttered that she had not understood; she craved
his pardon.