was melting with sympathetic
tenderness. He had starved for love all his life. His nature craved
love. It was an organic demand of his being. Yet he had gone without,
and hardened himself in the process. He had not known that he needed
love. Nor did he know it now. He merely saw it in operation, and
thrilled to it, and thought it fine, and high, and splendid.

He was glad that Mr. Morse was not there. It was difficult enough
getting acquainted with her, and her mother, and her brother, Norman.
Arthur he already knew somewhat. The father would have been too much for
him, he felt sure. It seemed to him that he had never worked so hard in
his life. The severest toil was child's play compared with this. Tiny
nodules of moisture stood out on his forehead, and his shirt was wet with
sweat from the exertion of doing so many unaccustomed things at once. He
had to eat as he had never eaten before, to handle strange tools, to
glance surreptitiously about and learn how to accomplish each new thing,
to receive the flood of impressions that was pouring in upon him and
being mentally annotated and classified; to be conscious of a yearning
for her that perturbed him in the form of a dull, aching restlessness; to
feel the prod of desire to win to the walk in life whereon she trod, and
to have his mind ever and again straying off in speculation and vague
plans of how to reach to her. Also, when his secret glance went across
to Norman opposite him, or to any one else, to ascertain just what knife
or fork was to be used in any particular occasion, that person's features
were seized upon by his mind, which automatically strove to appraise them
and to divine what they were--all in relation to her. Then he had to
talk, to hear what was said to him and what was said back and forth, and
to answer, when it was necessary, with a tongue prone to looseness of
speech that required a constant curb. And to add confusion to confusion,
there was the servant, an unceasing menace, that appeared noiselessly at
his shoulder, a dire Sphinx that propounded puzzles and conundrums
demanding instantaneous solution. He was oppressed throughout the meal
by the thought of finger-bowls. Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of
times, he wondered when they would come on and what they looked like. He
had heard of such things, and now, sooner or later, somewhere in the next
few minutes, he would see them, sit at table with exalted beings who used
them--