"Wilkie Collins - I Say No" - читать интересную книгу автора (Collins Wilkie)

turned to the summer-house window, and took up a pipe and tobacco pouch, left on
the ledge.
"I lost my only friend last year," he said. "Since the death of my dog, my pipe
is the one companion I have left. Naturally I am not allowed to enjoy the honest
fellow's society in the presence of ladies. They have their own taste in
perfumes. Their clothes and their letters reek with the foetid secretion of the
musk deer. The clean vegetable smell of tobacco is unendurable to them. Allow me
to retire--and let me thank you for the trouble you took to save my drawing."
The tone of indifference in which he expressed his gratitude piqued Francine.
She resented it by drawing her own conclusion from what he had said of the
ladies and the musk deer. "I was wrong in admiring your drawing," she remarked;
"and wrong again in thinking you a strange man. Am I wrong, for the third time,
in believing that you dislike women?"
"I am sorry to say you are right," Alban Morris answered gravely.
"Is there not even one exception?"
The instant the words passed her lips, she saw that there was some secretly
sensitive feeling in him which she had hurt. His black brows gathered into a
frown, his piercing eyes looked at her with angry surprise. It was over in a
moment. He raised his shabby hat, and made her a bow.
"There is a sore place still left in me," he said; "and you have innocently hit
it. Good-morning."
Before she could speak again, he had turned the corner of the summer-house, and
was lost to view in a shrubbery on the westward side of the grounds.



CHAPTER V.
DISCOVERIES IN THE GARDEN.
Left by herself, Miss de Sor turned back again by way of the trees.
So far, her interview with the drawing-master had helped to pass the time. Some
girls might have found it no easy task to arrive at a true view of the character
of Alban Morris. Francine's essentially superficial observation set him down as
"a little mad," and left him there, judged and dismissed to her own entire
satisfaction.
Arriving at the lawn, she discovered Emily pacing backward and forward, with her
head down and her hands behind her, deep in thought. Francine's high opinion of
herself would have carried her past any of the other girls, unless they had made
special advances to her. She stopped and looked at Emily.
It is the sad fate of little women in general to grow too fat and to be born
with short legs. Emily's slim finely-strung figure spoke for itself as to the
first of these misfortunes, and asserted its happy freedom from the second, if
she only walked across a room. Nature had built her, from head to foot, on a
skeleton-scaffolding in perfect proportion. Tall or short matters little to the
result, in women who possess the first and foremost advantage of beginning well
in their bones. When they live to old age, they often astonish thoughtless men,
who walk behind them in the street. "I give you my honor, she was as easy and
upright as a young girl; and when you got in front of her and looked--white
hair, and seventy years of age."
Francine approached Emily, moved by a rare impulse in her nature--the impulse to
be sociable. "You look out of spirits," she began. "Surely you don't regret