Quicksand
florid compliments in questionable taste. And had it been marriage that he had meant, he would, of course, have done the proper thing. He wouldn‘t have stopped—or, rather, have begun—by making his wishes known to her when there was Uncle Poul to be formally consulted. She had been, she told herself, insulted. And a goodly measure of contempt and wariness was added to her interest in the man. She was able, however, to feel a gratifying sense of elation in the remembrance that she had been silent, ostensibly unaware of his utterance, and therefore, as far as he knew, not affronted.
This simplified things. It did away with the quandary in which the confession to the Dahls of such a happening would have involved her, for she couldn‘t be sure that they, too, might not put it down to the difference of her ancestry. And she could still go attended by him, and envied by others, to openings in Konigen‘s Nytorv, to showings at the Royal Academy or Charlottenborg‘s Palace. He could still
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