th a man, to meet
him--if only for a few minutes--every day of ten days, to sit opposite
to him, and not far from him, at meals during the same space of time,
and to be unable to say to herself whether he was or was not a gentleman
by birth and education--feeling set aside--she would have answered
without hesitation that it would be utterly impossible. Yet so it was.
She could not decide. She could not place him. She could not imagine
what his parentage, what his youth, his manhood had been. She could
not fancy him in any environment--save that golden light, that blue
radiance, in which she had first consciously and fully met him face to
face. She could not hear him in converse with any set of men or women,
or invent, in her mind, what he might be likely to say to them. She
could not conceive him bound by any ties of home, or family, mother,
sister, wife, child. When she looked at him, thought about him, he
presented himself to her alone, like a thing in the air.

Yet he was more male than other men, breathed humanity--of some kind--as
fire breathes heat.

The child there was in him almost confused her, made her wonder whether
long contact with the world had tarnished her own original simplicity.
But she only saw the child in him now and then, and she fancied that it,
too, he was anxious to conceal.

This man had certainly a power to rouse feeling in others. She knew
it by her own experience. By turns he had made her feel motherly,
protecting, curious, constrained, passionate, energetic, timid--yes,
almost timid and shy. No other human being had ever, even at moments,
thus got the better of her natural audacity, lack of self-consciousness,
and inherent, almost boyish, boldness. Nor was she aware what it was in
him which sometimes made her uncertain of herself.

She wondered. But he often woke up wonder in her.

Despite their rides, their moments of intercourse in the hotel, on
the verandah, she scarcely felt more intimate with him than she had
at first. Sometimes indeed she thought that she felt less so, that the
moment when the train ran out of the tunnel into the blue country was
the moment in which they had been nearest to each other since they trod
the verges of each other's lives.

She had never definitely said to herself: "Do I like him or dislike
him?"

Now, as she sat with Count Anteoni watching the noon, the half-drowsy,
half-imaginative expression had gone out of her face. She looked rather
rigid, rat