--The bare notion of what
that formidable lady, not only might, but quite certainly would look and
say turned Miss Felicia positively faint.--No--no, clearly it had to
be--it had to be--or rather--she became incoherent--had not to be, if
only for dearest Charles's sake. Yet what a ten thousand pities; for
notwithstanding the plebeian origin on the mother's side, didn't
Faircloth--these reflections came later--really surpass every male Verity
present, young Tom included, though she confessed to a very soft spot in
her heart for young Tom?--Surpass them, just as her brother Charles had
always surpassed them in good looks and charm as in inches, above all in
his air of singular good-breeding? And how extraordinarily he had
transmitted this last to Faircloth, notwithstanding the--well, the
drawback, the obstacle to--Miss Felicia did not finish the sentence,
though in sentiment becoming sweetly abandoned. For how she would have
revelled, other things being equal--which they so deplorably weren't--in
shaking this singularly attractive nephew in the family's collective
face, just to show them what dearest Charles--who they never had quite
understood or appreciated--could do in the matter of sons, when he once
set about it, even against admittedly heavy odds!
As it was, she had to pacify her gentle extravagance by subjecting the
said nephew's hand to a long tremulous pressure at parting.
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