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`You are a luckier, if you mean that.'
`I don't mean that. I mean I am a man of more--more---'
`Say gallantry, while you are about it,' suggested Carton.
`Well! I'll say gallantry. My meaning is that I am a man,' said Stryver, inflating himself at his friend as he made the punch, `who cares more to be agreeable, Who takes more pains to be agreeable, who knows better how to be agreeable, in a woman's society, than you do.'
`Go on,' said Sydney Carton.
`No; but before I go on,' said Stryver, shaking his head in his bullying way, `I'll have this out with you. You've been at Dr. Manette's house as much as I have, or more than I have. Why, I have been ashamed of your moroseness there! Your manners have been of that silent and sullen and hang-dog kind, that, upon my life and soul, I have been ashamed of you, Sydney!'
`It should be very beneficial to a man in your practice at the bar, to be ashamed of anything,' returned Sydney; `you ought to be much obliged to me.
`You shall not get off in that Way,' rejoined Stryver, shouldering the rejoinder at him; `no, Sydney, it's my duty to tell you--and I tell you to your face to do you good--that you are a devilish ill-conditioned fellow in that sort of society. You are a disagreeable fellow.'
Sydney drank a bumper of the punch he had made, and laughed.
`Look at me!' said Stryver, squaring himself: `I have less need to make myself agreeable than you have, being more independent in circumstances. Why do I do it?'
`I never saw you do it yet,' muttered Carton.
`I do it because it's politic; I do it on principle. And look at me! I get on.'
`You don't get on with your account of your matrimonial intentions,' answered Carton, with a careless air; `I wish you would keep to that. As to me--will you never understand that I am incorrigible?'
He asked the question with some appearance of scorn.
`You have no business to be incorrigible,' was his friend's answer, delivered in no very soothing tone.
`I have no business to be, at all, that I know of,' said Sydney Carton. `Who is the lady?'
