Heart and Science. Wilkie Collins

to say good-bye.

      Taking the offered hand readily enough, the doctor repeated his odd question—“I haven’t been rude, have I?”—with an unpleasant appearance of going through a form purely for form’s sake. Ovid’s natural generosity of feeling urged him to meet the advance, strangely as it had been made, with a friendly reception.

      “I am afraid it is I who have been rude,” he said. “Will you go back with me, and be introduced to Carmina?”

      Benjulia made his acknowledgments in his own remarkable way. “No, thank you,” he said, quietly, “I’d rather see the monkey.”