His Grace — page 34: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

28 HIS GRACE. “Oh, indeed!” said she, in accents of cold displeas- ure. “Iam not acquainted with the present Duke of Hurstbourne ; but if he at all resembles his father, his house is not one in which I should wish to see any son of mine take up his abode.” I was sufficiently irritated to reply that I had never in my wildest dreams contemplated the honor of calling Lady Deverell my mother as a conceivable state of things, and that a man in my humble position could not, of course, aspire to her exclusiveness. Thereupon she stared at me for a moment and turned her back. She is a tall, gaunt woman, with a beaky nose, rather sunken black eyes and iron-gray hair. I do not think that I have ever been exactly afraid of her, but no doubt I should have been less uncivil to her if she had been less alarming. Moreover, I was, I must own, in a rather bad temper at the time, having other reasons besides my hostess’s impertinence for feeling annoyed. I did not like, and I never had liked, Mr. Burgess’s manner with my sister. Of course he was old enough to be her father, and he had baptized her and prepared her for confirmation and all that; still, there was something about his pon- derous and paternal playfulness in addressing her which had always been offensive to me, and which I could not help thinking was displayed to an unusual extent that evening. It would have been as absurd to accuse this elderly clerical widower of flirtation as to connect any idea of delicate innuendo with a bluebottle fly; still, I was so provoked by the way in which he kept buzzing round Nora that I took her away at the earliest possible moment, on the plea that, as I had to leave home the next morning, I wished to see as much as I Eomichboo <S (E(@)