Long credit is a mistake; but you found it a convenience, I
suppose; and now you are in funds, you will, of course, get out of debt.
If only that you may run into it again at need, you will draw a cheque.
Now, you had eight years of it at Wanless, you tell me? Very well, my
dear, that must be written off Society's books. Meanwhile, the more you
see of amusing, emancipated people like Alexis Morosine the better."
This man was understood to be a Pole in exile, though his title to that
distinction could only have been on the side of the distaff, since his
father's descent from a ducal family of Venice was not denied; but neither
nationality nor expatriation was very obvious upon him. At first sight you
would have supposed him a sallow Englishman, spare of flesh and too narrow
in the chest; you might have put down his dead complexion and his leanness
to India or Jamaica, and been inclined to attribute his dry cynicism to
the same superfervent experience. But presently you would be alive to his
hungry mind, to his hungry, raging air, his restless habit and large way
of looking at circumstance--as if by no possibility could it be any
concern of his. And then the trick he had of considering our people as
Europeans, of dividing the races of the world by continents rather than
kingdoms; and that other of judging all cases, including yours and his
own, upon their merits--such traits, to an experienced mind, would have
established him for a foreigner, one of a people who had had too much
elbowing for breath to have time or space for prejudice or minute
classification.
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