CHAPTER XLVII
DOCTOR BRYERLY REAPPEARS
No one who has not experienced it can imagine the nervous disgust and horror which such a spectacle as we had been forced in part to witness leaves upon the mind of a young person of my peculiar temperament.
It affected ever after my involuntary estimate of the principal actors in it. An exhibition of such thorough inferiority, accompanied by such a shock to the feminine sense of elegance, is not forgotten by any woman. Captain Oakley had been severely beaten by a smaller man. It was pitiable, but also undignified; and Milly’s anxieties about his teeth and nose, though in a certain sense horrible, had also a painful suspicion of the absurd.
People say, on the other hand, that superior prowess, even in such barbarous contests, inspires in our s*x a
