"Do you find it so much better than your own?" Molly inquired on this, in her outright way and as with a hint at impatience of many things.
"Ah, my dear, if mine's to be good enough for you I'm quite content with it--and it's indeed better than a great many we have. But I like Sir Cantopher more than I can perhaps make you understand"--our young man but desired to explain. It had at once, however, the effect of so moving to a queer small stridency of mirth the personage indicated, that a further remark was required. "I mean of course that we've no such honours, for the fine sound, and what shall I call it but the matching of the parts, of 'em?"
Whenever he explained--this perception grew--he produced a particular attention, the attention to which even Molly's impatiences yielded, and which had been most marked in the cold hush, consequent to all appearance on too much precipitation, vaguely scaring him just before his fellow-guest's arrival. It was the way indeed in which this fellow-guest now fixed him that made him grasp for an instant, as a sort of ban upon scares, the idea either of explaining a great deal more or of not explaining a mite. Yes, there was an extraordinary moment during which the four of them, Sir Cantopher included, affected him really as hanging on his choice--watching, that is, to see which course he would take. It was as if he did precipitate wonders, at a given juncture, just by some shade of a tone, a mere semiquaver, perhaps lighted too with a flicker of facial earnestness--though there was something all the while that he clearly couldn't help. It might, it must, have been the sense itself of spreading his wings, which would catch him up this way again and again, and which, when it came to that, he wouldn't have checked if he could, for how otherwise was he to surmount?--to surmount and surmount being exactly his affair, and success in it his inspiration, together with the fine truth that if the choice had to be between their puzzlement and his he'd be blest if he wouldn't risk theirs, since this there would doubtless after all be ways of surmounting, whereas he felt that mightn't be at all the case for his own. It had been repeated for him that each time he didn't flounder made somehow, almost immediately after, for the greater felicity of another time, and thus not to flounder at the actual point he was dealing with would be best assured by his right selection of the alternative they seemed so to wait for him to take.