"
Ralph was puzzled by this appeal, and it is perhaps not to the
credit of his purity of mind that he failed to look at it at first
in the simplest light. It wore, to his eyes, a tortuous air, and his
fault was that he was not quite sure that anything in the world
could really be as candid as this request of Miss Stackpole's
appeared. That a young woman should demand that a gentleman whom she
described as her very dear friend should be furnished with an
opportunity to make himself agreeable to another young woman, a
young woman whose attention had wandered and whose charms were
greater- this was an anomaly which for the moment challenged all his
ingenuity of interpretation. To read between the lines was easier than
to follow the text, and to suppose that Miss Stackpole wished the
gentleman invited to Gardencourt on her own account was the sign not
so much of a vulgar as of an embarrassed mind. Even from this venial
act of vulgarity, however, Ralph was saved, and saved by a force
that I can only speak of as inspiration. With no more outward light on
the subject than he already possessed he suddenly acquired the
conviction that it would be a sovereign injustice to the correspondent
of the Interviewer to assign a dishonourable motive to any act of
hers.
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