sness.

It ought to be known, and known at once; she ought to tell her brother,
as soon as she saw him; she thought of telling her aunt, and she fancied
having to shout the affair into her ear, and having to repeat, "He kissed
me! Don't you understand? Kissed me!" Then she reflected with a start
that she could never tell any one, that in the midst of her world she was
alone in relation to this; she was as helpless and friendless as the
poorest and lowliest girl could be. She was more so, for if she were like
the maid whom the grocer's boy kissed she would be of an order of things
in which she could advise with some one else who had been kissed; and she
would know what to feel.

She asked herself whether she was at all moved at heart; till now it
seemed to her that it had not been different with her toward him from
what it had been toward all the other men whose meaning she would have
liked to find out. She had not in the least respected them, and she did
not respect him; but if it happened because he was overcome by his love
for her, and could not help it, then perhaps she must forgive him whether
she cared for him or not.

These ideas presented themselves with the simultaneity of things in a
dream in that instant when she lingered helplessly in his hold, and she
even wondered if by any chance Andrew had seen them; but she heard his
step on the floor below; and at the same time it appeared to her that she
must be in love with this man if she did not resent what he had done.

XLIII

Westover was sitting at an open window of his studio smoking out into the
evening air, and looking down into the thinly foliaged tops of the public
garden, where the electrics fainted and flushed and hissed. Cars trooped
by in the troubled street, scraping the wires overhead that screamed as
if with pain at the touch of their trolleys, and kindling now and again a
soft planet, as the trolleys struck the batlike plates that connected the
crossing lines. The painter was getting almost as much pleasure out of
the planets as pain out of the screams, and he was in an after-dinner
languor in which he was very reluctant to recognize a step, which he
thought he knew, on his stairs and his stairs-landing. A knock at his
door followed the sound of the approaching steps. He lifted himself, and
called out, inhospitably, "Come in!" and, as he expected, Jeff Durgin
came in. Westover's meetings with him had been an increasing discomfort
since his