Perhaps he did. Perhaps in his quiet, cautious way, he was jealous of Conny, and thought if he should give me time to make love to her again, I might win her away from him. He had very well known that I had her mamma on my side; that if my uncle had suspected his daughter’s attachment, I should have had him on my side too; that I could claim to be a gentleman; that I was a prospective partner in the bank; in a word, that I was hedged about with every condition calculated to secure me a triumph; whilst he on his side had literally nothing whatever to make him hopeful but Conny’s promises, which caprice might at any moment cause her to break.
I looked at his vacant stool, and thought of him sitting there and laughing internally at the trick he and Conny were playing me; of the grinning that must have gone on behind my back, when my cousin mockingly repeated the language I had addressed to her, and mimicked the attitudes of entreaty which I had no doubt unconsciously thrown myself into whilst begging her to tell me that--
Pshaw! never mind. It is all past. I never really loved her. I thought her bewitchingly pretty, and wanted to possess her; I thought it would be the agreeablest pastime to play with her sunny hair, and trace my haunting face in her deep eyes. It was a young man’s fancy. I fancied her. But could that mean I _loved_ her, when the first puff that came blew my flame out, and left my heart free for thy clearer radiance, my T.?
Mortifying, fearfully mortifying the whole thing was, I agree. To be made ridiculous in the eyes of a cashier who touched his hat when he met me in the street and often called me Sir; to be jilted for a lean banker’s clerk whose learning lay in his ledger, the horizon of whose mind was the circle of a sovereign; who wrote like a copy-book, and counted like the sums in Colenso--as accurately, I mean (faugh! I wouldn’t give twopence for such plebeian parts!). Yes, fearfully mortifying all this was. How many years have passed since then? It matters not--but though my waistcoats of that epoch would require another foot added to them to bring the buttons and the button-holes together upon my present dignified figure, I cannot recur to this one great sackcloth-and-ashes experience of mine without feeling my spleen enlarged under my left ribs, and my multifarious perceptions grow jaundiced.