Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/126

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118
"BONES AND I."

in your generosity, your magnanimity, and the self-devoted courage that bids you accept the stab of ingratitude in addition to the pain of neglect? It depends entirely on character and temperament.

Men and women vary so much in this, as in every other phase of feeling. The latter, when they do take the more generous view of their position—when they can bring themselves to choose "the better part," accept it, I think, with a more complete abandonment of pique than the former. Perhaps their pride is of a nobler order: no doubt their vanity is less egotistical than our own. With us, except in the highest natures—and these, as has been well remarked, have ever a leavening of the feminine element in their organization—there is always something of irritation left after a wound of the affections has healed up—something that stings and rankles, and looks to reprisals of one kind or