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XXXIII. THE ABASEMENT OF MR. HOOPDRIVER
On Monday morning the two fugitives found themselves breakfasting at the
Golden Pheasant in Blandford. They were in the course of an elaborate
doubling movement through Dorsetshire towards Ringwood, where Jessie
anticipated an answer from her schoolmistress friend. By this time they
had been nearly sixty hours together, and you will understand that Mr.
Hoopdriver's feelings had undergone a considerable intensification and
development. At first Jessie had been only an impressionist sketch
upon his mind, something feminine, active, and dazzling, something
emphatically "above" him, cast into his company by a kindly fate.
His chief idea, at the outset, as you know, had been to live up to
her level, by pretending to be more exceptional, more wealthy, better
educated, and, above all, better born than he was. His knowledge of the
feminine mind was almost entirely derived from the young ladies he had
met in business, and in that class (as in military society and among
gentlemen's servants) the good old tradition of a brutal social
exclusiveness is still religiously preserved. He had an almost
intolerable dread of her thinking him a I bounder.' Later he began
to perceive the distinction of her idiosyncracies. Coupled with a
magnificent want of experience was a splendid enthusiasm for abstract
views of the most advanced description, and her strength of conviction
completely carried Hoopdriver away. She was going to Live her Own Life,
with emphasis, and Mr. Hoopdriver was profoundly stirred to similar
resolves. So soon as he grasped the tenor of her views, he perceived
that he himself had thought as much from his earliest years. "Of
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