And I should like to have seen Catherine's face if I had expressed any sympathy with the hare! No; it was better to be unscrupulously stanch to one woman than weakly chivalrous toward both; and my mind was made up by the end of dinner.
There was only one chance now of saving the wretched Bob, or rather one way of setting to work to save him; and that was by actually adopting the course with which he had already credited me.

He thought I was "trying to cut him out." Well, I would try! But the more I thought of him, of Mrs.Lascelles, of them both, the less sanguine I felt of success; for had I been she (I could not help admitting it to myself), as lonely, as reckless, as unlucky, I would have married the dear young idiot on the spot.

Not that my own marriage (with Mrs.Lascelles) was an end that I contemplated for a moment as I took my cynical resolve.

And now I trust that I have made both my position and my intentions very plain, and have written myself down neither more of a fool nor less of a knave than circumstances (and one's own infirmities) combined to make me at this juncture of my career.
The design was still something bolder than its execution, and if Bob did not propose that night it was certainly no fault of mine.

I saw him with Mrs.Lascelles on the terrace after dinner; but I had neither the heart nor the face to thrust myself upon them.