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Malbone: an Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
page 44 of 186 (23%)

This abundant and spontaneous feeling gave him an air of
earnestness, without which he could not have charmed any woman,
and, least of all, one like Hope. No woman really loves a
trifler; she must at least convince herself that he who trifles
with others is serious with her. Philip was never quite serious
and never quite otherwise; he never deliberately got up a
passion, for it was never needful; he simply found an object
for his emotions, opened their valves, and then watched their
flow. To love a charming woman in her presence is no test of
genuine passion; let us know how much you long for her in
absence. This longing had never yet seriously troubled Malbone,
provided there was another charming person within an easy walk.

If it was sometimes forced upon him that all this ended in
anguish to some of these various charmers, first or last, then
there was always in reserve the pleasure of repentance. He was
very winning and generous in his repentances, and he enjoyed
them so much they were often repeated. He did not pass for a
weak person, and he was not exactly weak; but he spent his life
in putting away temptations with one hand and pulling them back
with the other. There was for him something piquant in being
thus neither innocent nor guilty, but always on some delicious
middle ground. He loved dearly to skate on thin ice,--that was
the trouble,--especially where he fancied the water to be just
within his depth. Unluckily the sea of life deepens rather
fast.

Malbone had known Hope from her childhood, as he had known her
cousins, but their love dated from their meetings beside the
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