This
was a great honor, and you may believe that I valued it. It turned
my head, and I lived only to see my happiness come to pass. She did
everything to encourage me to hope it would; everything that her
infernal coquetry and falsity could suggest."
"Oh, I say, this is too much!" Rowland broke out.
"Do you defend her?" Roderick cried, with a renewal of his passion. "Do
you pretend to say that she gave me no hopes?" He had been speaking
with growing bitterness, quite losing sight of his mother's pain and
bewilderment in the passionate joy of publishing his wrongs. Since he
was hurt, he must cry out; since he was in pain, he must scatter his
pain abroad. Of his never thinking of others, save as they spoke and
moved from his cue, as it were, this extraordinary insensibility to the
injurious effects of his eloquence was a capital example; the more so
as the motive of his eloquence was never an appeal for sympathy or
compassion, things to which he seemed perfectly indifferent and of which
he could make no use. The great and characteristic point with him was
the perfect absoluteness of his own emotions and experience.
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