spirit. A tremour of alarm ran through her.

His request for one of the crocuses to keep as a souvenir of the morning
was refused. 'They are sacred; they were all devoted to my friend when I
plucked them.'

He pointed to a half-open one, with the petals in disparting pointing
to junction, and compared it to the famous tiptoe ballet-posture, arms
above head and fingers like swallows meeting in air, of an operatic
danseuse of the time.

'I do not see it, because I will not see it,' she said, and she found a
personal cooling and consolement in the phrase.--We have this power of
resisting invasion of the poetic by the commonplace, the spirit by the
blood, if we please, though you men may not think that we have! Her
alarmed sensibilities bristled and made head against him as an enemy.
She fancied (for the aforesaid reason--because she chose) that it was on
account of the offence to her shy morning pleasure by his Londonizing.
At any other moment her natural liveliness and trained social ease would
have taken any remark on the eddies of the tide of converse; and so
she told herself, and did not the less feel wounded, adverse, armed. He
seemed somehow--to have dealt a mortal blow to the happy girl she had
become again. The woman she was protested on behalf of the girl, while
the girl in her heart bent lowered sad eyelids to the woman; and which
of them was wiser of the truth she could not have said, for she was
honestly not aware of the truth, but she knew she was divided in halves,
with one half pitying the other, one rebuking: and all because of the
incongruous comparison of a wild flower to an opera dancer! Absurd
indeed. We human creatures are the silliest on earth, most certainly.

Dacier had observed the blush, and the check to her flowing tongue did
not escape him as they walked back to the inn down the narrow street of
black rooms, where the women gossiped at the fountain and the cobbler
threaded on his doorstep. His novel excitement supplied the deficiency,
sweeping him past minor reflections. He was, however, surprised to
hear her tell Lady Esquart, as soon as they were together at the
breakfast-table, that he had the intention of starting for England;
and further surprised, and slightly stung too, when on the poor lady's,
moaning over her recollection of the midnight Bell, and vowing she could
not attempt to sleep another night in the place, Diana declared her
resolve to stay there one day longer with her maid,