Alexia

vors ; and Geoffrey Trevor was one of these. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and half-a-dozen fairy godmothers, he had been surfeited with sweets, until his appetite had first palled, then perished, by what it had fed on. And if the laying down of his life (I quote his own sentiment now) had not involved more loathing, in anticipation of the nuisance it would have entailed upon others, than the bearing of it already did, in fulfilment, to himself, he would have been, not glad exactly, for primary emotions were gone for him, but willing enough to shuffle it off, and have done with it. Hardly the tone of a rapturous wooer, if I understand such things. Helen Courtice, a magnificent, proud creature in Geoffrey's set, happened to be chapter{Section 4the girl he chose thus to " honor." I say happened, for there would have been equal fitness in the selection if it had fallen upon any one of twenty others, all of the same pattern, with whom Geoffrey had been in the habit of spending much time before his latest season of misanthropy had set in. I was fearfully shocked when I heard this news about Geoffrey, and at first I refused to believe it. For it was not three days since Geoffrey had come to me in one of his blackest, bitterest moods. He said that he believed his blood was drying up in his veins ; that he felt no sensations, either of pleasure or of pain ; that he neither liked nor disliked anything nor anybody ; that he was incapable of feeling hungry or ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.