inutes--a space of
time during which his fellow-visitor had neither budged nor uttered a
sound--he had made Mrs. Worthingham out as all at once perfectly pleased
to see him, completely aware of what he had most in mind, and singularly
serene in face of his sense of their impediment. It was as if for all
the world she didn't take it for one, the immobility, to say nothing of
the seeming equanimity, of their tactless companion; at whom meanwhile
indeed our friend himself, after his first ruffled perception, no more
adventured a look than if advised by his constitutional kindness that
to notice her in any degree would perforce be ungraciously to glower.
He talked after a fashion with the woman as to whose power to please and
amuse and serve him, as to whose really quite organised and indicated
fitness for lighting up his autumn afternoon of life his conviction had
lately strained itself so clear; but he was all the while carrying on
an intenser exchange with his own spirit and trying to read into
the charming creature's behaviour, as he could only call it, some
confirmation of his theory that she also had her inward flutter and
anxiously counted on him. He found support, happily for the conviction
just named, in the idea, at no moment as yet really repugnant to him,
the idea bound up in fact with the finer essence of her appeal, that she
had her own vision too of her quality and her price, and that the
last appearance she would have liked to bristle with was that of being
forewarned and eager.

He had, if he came to think of it, scarce definitely warned her, and he
probably wouldn't have taken to her so consciously in the first instance
without an appreciative sense that, as she was a little person of twenty
superficial graces, so she was also a little person with her secret
pride. She might just have planted her mangy lion--not to say her
muzzled house-dog--there in his path as a symbol that she wasn't cheap
and easy; which would be a thing he couldn't possibly wish his future
wife to have shown herself in advance, even if to him alone. That she
could make him put himself such questions was precisely part of the
attaching play of her iridescent surface, the shimmering interfusion
of her various aspects; that of her youth with her independence--her
pecuniary perhaps in particular, that of her vivacity with her beauty,
that of her facility above all with her odd novelty; the high modernity,
as people appeared to have come t