Don't you LIKE your brother as he is," he went on, "and haven't you given your mother an intelligible account of all that that comes to ?" It put to her also, doubtless, his own tone, too many things, this at least would have been the case hadn't his final challenge directly helped her.

Everything, at the stage they had reached, directly helped her, because everything betrayed in him such a basis of intention.

He saw--the odd way things came out!--that he would have been held less monstrous had he only been a little wilder.

What exposed him was just his poor old trick of quiet inwardness, what exposed him was his THINKING such offence.

He hadn't in the least however the desire to irritate that Sarah imputed to him, and he could only at last temporise, for the moment, with her indignant view.