He spoke deliberately, as if weighing
his words well, so that, during his few remarks, Mr. Bernard had time
for a mental accompaniment with variations, accented by certain bodily
changes, which escaped Mr. Peckham's observation. First there was a
feeling of disgust and shame at hearing Helen Darley spoken of like a
dumb working animal. That sent the blood up into his cheeks. Then the
slur upon her probable want of force--_her_ incapacity, who made the
character of the school and left this man to pocket its profits--sent a
thrill of the old Wentworth fire through him, so that his muscles
hardened, his hands closed, and he took the measure of Mr. Silas
Peckham, to see if his head would strike the wall in case he went over
backwards all of a sudden. This would not do, of course, and so the
thrill passed off and the muscles softened again. Then came that state
of tenderness in the heart, overlying wrath in the stomach, in which
the eyes grow moist like a woman's, and there is also a great
boiling-up of objectionable terms out of the deep-water vocabulary, so
that Prudence and Propriety and all the other pious Ps have to jump
upon the lid of speech to keep them from boiling _over_ into fierce
articulation. All this was internal, chiefly, and of course not
recognized by Mr.
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