But with the girl he
attempted no return to the situation at Carlsbad; there is nothing like
the delicate pride of a young man who resolves to forego unfair advantage
in love.
The day after their arrival, when her father was making up for the sleep
he had lost by night, she found herself alone in the little reading-room
of the hotel with Burnamy for the first time, and she said: "I suppose
you must have been all over Weimar by this time."
"Well, I've been here, off and on, almost a month. It's an interesting
place. There's a good deal of the old literary quality left."
"And you enjoy that! I saw"--she added this with a little unnecessary
flush--"your poem in the paper you lent papa."
"I suppose I ought to have kept that back. But I couldn't." He laughed,
and she said:
"You must find a great deal of inspiration in such a literary place."
"It isn't lying about loose, exactly." Even in the serious and perplexing
situation in which he found himself he could not help being amused with
her unliterary notions of literature, her conventional and commonplace
conceptions of it. They had their value with him as those of a more
fashionable world than his own, which he believed was somehow a greater
world.
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