o call it, that made her so much
more "knowing" in some directions than even he, man of the world as he
certainly was, could pretend to be, though all on a basis of the most
unconscious and instinctive and luxurious assumption. She was "up" to
everything, aware of everything--if one counted from a short enough time
back (from week before last, say, and as if quantities of history had
burst upon the world within the fortnight); she was likewise surprised
at nothing, and in that direction one might reckon as far ahead as the
rest of her lifetime, or at any rate as the rest of his, which was all
that would concern him: it was as if the suitability of the future
to her personal and rather pampered tastes was what she most took for
granted, so that he could see her, for all her Dresden-china shoes and
her flutter of wondrous befrilled contemporary skirts, skip by the side
of the coming age as over the floor of a ball-room, keeping step with
its monstrous stride and prepared for every figure of the dance. Her
outlook took form to him suddenly as a great square sunny window that
hung in assured fashion over the immensity of life. There rose toward it
as from a vast swarming _plaza_ a high tide of emotion and sound; yet it
was at the same time as if even while he looked her light gemmed hand,
flashing on him in addition to those other things the perfect polish of
the prettiest pink finger-nails in the world, had touched a spring, the
most ingenious of ecent devices for instant ease, which dropped half
across the scene a soft-coloured mechanical blind, a fluttered, fringed
awning of charmingly toned silk, such as would make a bath of cool shade
for the favoured friend leaning with her there--that is for the happy
couple itself--on the balcony. The great view would be the prospect and
privilege of the very state he coveted--since didn't he covet it?--the
state of being so securely at her side; while the wash of privacy, as
one might count it, the broad fine brush dipped into clear umber and
passed, full and wet, straight across the strong scheme of colour, would
represent the security itself, all the uplifted inner elegance, the
condition, so ideal, of being shut out from nothing and yet of having,
so gaily and breezily aloft, none of the burden or worry of anything.
Thus, as I say, for our friend, the place itself, while his vivid
impression lasted, portentously opened and spread, and what was before
him took, to his vision, thoug