g a one as _she_ was still, to every
appearance, in her perfect serenity, trying to make of him; and the one
straight answer to it _would_ be that he should reach forward and touch
the footman's shoulder and demand that the vehicle itself should make an
end.

That would be an answer, however, he continued intensely to see, only to
inanely importunate, to utterly superfluous Amy Evans--not a bit to his
at last exquisitely patient companion, who was clearly now quite taking
it from him that what kept him in his attitude was the spring of the
quick desire to oblige her, the charming loyal impulse to consider a
little what he could do for her, say "handsomely yet conscientiously"
(oh the loveliness!) before he should commit himself. She was
enchanted--_that_ seemed to breathe upon him; she waited, she hung
there, she quite bent over him, as Diana over the sleeping Endymion,
while all the conscientious man of letters in him, as she might so
supremely have phrased it, struggled with the more peccable, the more
muddled and "squared," though, for her own ideal, the so much more
_banal_ comrade. Yes, he could keep it up now--that is he could hold out
for his real reply, could meet the rather marked tension of the rest of
their passage as well as she; he should be able somehow or other to
make his wordless detachment, the tribute of his ostensibly deep
consideration of her request, a retreat in good order. She _was_, for
herself, to the last point of her guileless fatuity, Amy Evans and an
asker for "lifts," a conceiver of twaddle both in herself and in him;
or at least, so far as she fell short of all this platitude, it was
no fault of the really affecting folly of her attempt to become a
mere magazine mortal after the only fashion she had made out, to the
intensification of her self-complacency, that she might.

Nothing might thus have touched him more--if to be touched, beyond a
certain point, hadn't been to be squared--than the way she failed to
divine the bearing of his thoughts; so that she had probably at no one
small crisis of her life felt so much a promise in the flutter of her
own as on the occasion of the beautiful act she indulged in at the very
moment, he was afterward to recognise, of their sweeping into her
great smooth, empty, costly street--a desert, at that hour, of lavish
lamplight and sculptured stone. She raised to her lips the hand she
had never yet released and kept it there a moment pressed close against