The impression
conveyed to me by her unenthusiastic though skilfully polite letter was
of one who had formed the habit of doubting beyond her years. These I
judged to be twenty-eight or thereabouts, while her powers of restraint
under provocation to believe savored of more years than even her mother
could claim. I had myself been compelled to note the value of negative
views, save in that inner and lonely world where I abode of nights and
Sundays; I, too, had proved the wisdom of much doubting as to actual,
literal events; but Little Miss was making me think of myself as almost
raw-and-twenty credulous. In a lawyer's letter of formal conciseness,
devoid of humanities, maintaining to the end an atmosphere of
unemotional fact and figure that descended not even to conventional
felicitations upon the result, I therefore acquainted Little Miss with
the situation. So nearly perfect was this letter that it caused her to
refer to me, in a later communication to Miss Caroline, as "your
dry-and-dusty counting-machine of a lawyer, who doubtless considers the
multiplication table as a cycle of sonnets." That, after I had merely
determined to meet her palpable needs and had signed myself her obedient
servant!
But I had convinced her.
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