soon as she found herself in presence of the real thing,
the romantic life itself. That was what she saw in Mildred--what
positively made her hand a while tremble too much for the pen. She had
had, it seemed to her, a revelation--such as even New England refined
and grammatical couldn't give; and, all made up as she was of small
neat memories and ingenuities, little industries and ambitions, mixed
with something moral, personal, that was still more intensely
responsive, she felt her new friend would have done her an ill turn if
their friendship shouldn't develop, and yet that nothing would be left
of anything else if it should. It was for the surrender of everything
else that she was, however, quite prepared, and while she went about
her usual Boston business with her usual Boston probity she was really
all the while holding herself. She wore her "handsome" felt hat, so
Tyrolese, yet some how, though feathered from the eagle's wing, so
truly domestic, with the same straightness and security; she attached
her fur boa with the same honest precautions; she preserved her balance
on the ice-slopes with the same practised skill; she opened, each
evening, her "Transcript" with the same interfusion of suspense and
resignation; she attended her almost daily concert with the same
expenditure of patience and the same economy of passion; she flitted in
and out of the Public Library with the air of conscientiously returning
or bravely carrying off in her pocket the key of knowledge itself; and
finally--it was what she most did--she watched the thin trickle of a
fictive "love-interest" through that somewhat serpentine channel, in
the magazines, which she mainly managed to keep clear for it. But the
real thing, all the while, was elsewhere; the real thing had gone back
to New York, leaving behind it the two unsolved questions, quite
distinct, of why it _was_ real, and whether she should ever be so near
it again.

For the figure to which these questions attached themselves she had
found a convenient description--she thought of it for herself, always,
as that of a girl with a background. The great reality was in the fact
that, very soon, after but two or three meetings, the girl with the
background, the girl with the crown of old gold and the mourning that
was not as the mourning of Boston, but at once more rebellious in its
gloom and more frivolous in its frills, had told her she had never seen
any one like her. They had met thus as o