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Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924

"Chance"


He could only repeat "Oh yes. You are perfectly honest. You might have,
but I dare say you are right. At any rate you have never said anything
to me which you didn't mean."
"Never," she whispered after a pause.
He seemed distracted, choking with an emotion she could not understand
because it resembled embarrassment, a state of mind inconceivable in that
man.
She wondered what it was she had said; remembering that in very truth she
had hardly spoken to him except when giving him the bare outline of her
story which he seemed to have hardly had the patience to hear, waving it
perpetually aside with exclamations of horror and anger, with fiercely
sombre mutters "Enough! Enough!" and with alarming starts from a forced
stillness, as though he meant to rush out at once and take vengeance on
somebody. She was saying to herself that he caught her words in the air,
never letting her finish her thought. Honest. Honest. Yes certainly
she had been that. Her letter to Mrs. Fyne had been prompted by honesty.
But she reflected sadly that she had never known what to say to him.


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