.
    »Only think of our happening to meet him! - How very odd! It was quite a
chance, he said, that he had not gone round by Randalls. He did not think we
ever walked this road. He thought we walked towards Randalls most days. He has
not been able to get the Romance of the Forest yet. He was so busy the last time
he was at Kingston that he quite forgot it, but he goes again to-morrow. So very
odd we should happen to meet! Well, Miss Woodhouse, is he like what you
expected? What do you think of him? Do you think him so very plain?«
    »He is very plain, undoubtedly - remarkably plain: - but that is nothing,
compared with his entire want of gentility. I had no right to expect much, and I
did not expect much; but I had no idea that he could be so very clownish, so
totally without air. I had imagined him, I confess, a degree or two nearer
gentility.«
    »To be sure,« said Harriet, in a mortified voice, »he is not so genteel as
real gentlemen.«
    »I think, Harriet, since your acquaintance with us, you have been repeatedly
in the company of some, such very real gentlemen, that you must yourself be
struck with the difference in Mr. Martin. At Hartfield you have had very good
specimens of well educated, well bred men. I should be surprized if, after
seeing them, you could be in company with Mr. Martin again without perceiving
him to be a very inferior creature - and rather wondering at yourself for having
ever thought him at all agreeable before. Do not you begin to feel that now?
Were not you struck? I am sure you must have been struck by his awkward look and
abrupt manner - and the uncouthness of a voice, which I heard to be wholly
unmodulated as I stood here.«
    »Certainly, he is not like Mr. Knightley. He has not such a fine air and way
of walking as Mr. Knightley. I see the difference plain enough. But Mr.
Knightley is so very fine a man!«
    »Mr. Knightley's air is so remarkably good, that it is not fair to compare
Mr. Martin with him. You might not see one in a hundred, with gentleman so
plainly written as in Mr. Knightley. But he is not the only gentleman you have
been lately used to. What say you to Mr. Weston and Mr. Elton? Compare Mr.
