e so, a very
wonderful thing happened, of which he could scarce, later on, have made
a clear statement, though he was to think it over again and again. She
moved toward him, she reached him, she stood there, she sat down near
him, he merely passive and wonderstruck, unresentfully "impressed,"
gaping and taking it in--and all as with an open allowance on the part
of each, so that they positively and quite intimately met in it, o the
impertinence for their case, this case that brought them again,
after horrible years, face to face, of the vanity, the profanity, the
impossibility, of anything between them but silence.

Nearer to him, beside him at a considerable interval (oh she was
immensely considerate!) she presented him, in the sharp terms of
her transformed state--but thus the more amply, formally,
ceremoniously--with the reasons that would serve him best for not having
precipitately known her. She was simply another and a totally different
person, and the exhibition of it to which she had proceeded with this
solemn anxiety was all, obviously, for his benefit--once he had, as
he appeared to be doing, provisionally accepted her approach. He had
remembered her as inclined to the massive and disowned by the graceful;
but this was a spare, fine, worn, almost wasted lady--who had repaired
waste, it was true, however, with something he could only appreciate as
a rich accumulation of manner. She was strangely older, so far as that
went--marked by experience and as if many things had happened to
her; her face had suffered, to its improvement, contraction and
concentration; and if he had granted, of old and from the first, that
her eyes were remarkable, had they yet ever had for him this sombre
glow? Withal, something said, she had flourished--he felt it, wincing at
it, as that; she had had a life, a career, a history--something that
her present waiting air and nervous consciousness couldn't prevent his
noting there as a deeply latent assurance. She had flourished, she had
flourished--though to learn it after this fashion was somehow at the
same time not to feel she flaunted it. It wasn't thus execration that
she revived in him; she made in fact, exhibitively, as he could only
have put it, the matter of long ago irrelevant, and these extraordinary
minutes of their reconstituted relation--how many? how few?--addressed
themselves altogether to new possibilities.

Still it after a little awoke in him as with the throb of a touch