after it 
has won the victory.'

'Very kind of you, and very pretty, Amy,' said he, smiling; 'but, in 
the meantime, it is surely wrong to be more prickly than is 
unavoidable, and there is the perplexity.  Selfish! selfish! selfish!  
Oneself the first object.  That is the root.'

'Guy, if it is not impertinent to ask, I do wordnetdesire you would tell me one 
.  Why did you think it wrong to go to that ball?' said Amy, 
timidly.

'I don't know that I thought it wrong to go to that individual ball,' 
said Guy; 'but my notion was, that altogether I was getting into a 
rattling idle way, never doing my proper quantity of work, or doing it 
properly, and talking a lot of nonsense sometimes.  I thought, last 
Sunday, it was time to make a short turn somewhere and bring myself up.  
I could not, or did not get out of the pleasant talks as Laura does, so 
I thought giving up this ball would punish me at once, and set me on a 
new tack of behaving like a reasonable creature.'

'Don't call yourself too many names, or you won't be civil to us