Explore "A Waif's Progress" by Rhoda Broughton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
After that, being a merciful man, Edward let her get off the historico-artistic gridiron, upon which he had been innocently grilling her. He showed her no more pictures, nor, indeed, anything else except his smoking-room, in which she exhibited a lively, and this time perfectly unfeigned interest, and where her intelligent inquiries as to the brand of cigars favoured by him, and her discriminating knowledge of the subject in contrast to her abysmal ignorance of the former ones, taught him that hers had not been a past of mere cigarettes. She had nourished a faint hope that he might have invited her to share a friendly whiff there and then, but it was clearly not to be. Instead, he gently ejected her. "Of course, the old camel would smell it," said the disappointed young creature, inwardly feeling a sensible relief in this ingeniously insulting play upon the name of her latest benefactress.
Edward had escorted her back to the very spot where he had found her, opposite the calumniated Dierick Bouts; and with despair she saw, or thought she saw, in his eye an imminent intention of leaving her. What could she do to arrest him? Rush at once into some entanglingly interesting subject which would rob him of that wish to escape which it was so incomprehensible that he could ever have nourished? Ask him why he married Camilla?