world is an old solicitor." (Here she was on the point of asking him if he had ever met Mr. Twisden, but prudence stopped her.)
Baring. "In America we honour the law, and we have no invidious distinctions. No one there thinks it 'a beastly profession.'"
George (laughing). "We are adopting many American views, and none by which I shall benefit more than this."
Hatty. "The 'lawyer,' as we see him in old plays and novels, was once almost a synonym for trickery and falsity. The world is more liberal now."
George. "Is it? I don't know. Perhaps it has only changed its illiberality from professions to persons. Is not this a suspicious age? Certainly not one that takes the unknown on trust."
Baring (dryly). "Why should it?"
George (smiling). "Because we are such riddles to each other, even after years of 'knowing'—such tangled webs of good and bad—that we may as well take it for granted the man we know nothing of is not much worse, if he is not much better, than the rest of us."
Hatty. "We women believe in our intuition."
Eliza. "Oh! I don't trust mine—that is to say, I don't want to trust it."
Hatty. "But you do, my dear; and it is the weakest thing about you—your intuitive faculty. It will lead to your being called 'capricious;' I know it will. You conceive quite an erroneous idea of some one—you did so lately, you know—and then, when you find you were mistaken, you drop him. No, your intuitive faculty is weak."
