Miss Brown; A Novel Volume 2 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VI. Richard Brown did not let Madame Elaguine sit at his feet very long. After about a fortnight of extremely assiduous visits at the Russian lady's house at Kensington, during which he poured out to the enthusiastic little woman all his philanthropical schemes, Richard suddenly gave up calling, and even avoided meeting Madame Elaguine at other houses. "Why have you deserted Madame Elaguine so suddenly1?" asked Anne of her cousin. To confess the truth, Anne was rather malicious in her question. She had speedily recognised the vanity, or rather the self-sufficiency, the belief in his own irresistible uniqueness, which was the leaven of Cousin Dick's virtues, and she had been amused from the first at seeing how this earnest philanthropist had let himself be caught by Madame Elaguine's conscious or unconscious instinct of flirtation; and now, she thought, Dick has suddenly awaked from his dream of having fascinated and converted her. Anne smiled as she asked the questioD, but there was sadness as well as amusement in her smile. In his way--his blind, self-satisfied, unselfish way--Dick was as vain as Hamlin: wherever she looked vanity and hollowness met her, and she herself could not even conceive what vanity was. "Why have you deserted Madame Elaguine?" repeated Anne. Brown suddenly raised his big, rough, black head from the review which he had been mechanically looking at, and answered, looking straight in front of him-- "Don't speak to me about Madame Elaguine; she is an odious woman." There was something brief and silencing in his tone which surprised Anne and precluded further questions. "In fact," added Richard Brown, "if it were not that a woman like you will never even understand what Madame Elaguine is made of, I should...