What a really nice girl might have done with him I cannot tell,
but fate had thrown none such in his way except His youngest sister
Alethea, whom he might perhaps have liked if she had not been his
sister. The result of his experience was that women had never done him
any good and he was not accustomed to associate them with any
pleasure; if there was a part of Hamlet in connection with them it had
been so completely cut out in the edition of the play in which he
was required to act that he had come to disbelieve in its existence.
As for kissing, he had never kissed a woman in his life except his
sister- and my own sisters when we were all small children together.
Over and above these kisses, he had until quite lately been required
to imprint a solemn, flabby kiss night and morning upon his father's
cheek, and this, to the best of my belief, was the extent of
Theobald's knowledge in the matter of kissing, at the time of which
I am now writing. The result of the foregoing was that he had come
to dislike women, as mysterious beings whose ways were not as his
ways, nor their thoughts as his thoughts.
With these antecedents, Theobald naturally felt rather bashful on
finding himself the admired of five strange young ladies.
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