ediately
said to him; it was represented by the remark she had needed but ten
minutes to make and that he hadn't been disposed to gainsay. He could
toddle alone, and the difference that showed was extraordinary. The
turn taken by their talk had promptly confirmed this difference; his
larger confidence on the score of Mrs. Newsome did the rest; and the
time seemed already far off when he had held out his small thirsty cup
to the spout of her pail. Her pail was scarce touched now, and other
fountains had flowed for him; she fell into her place as but one of his
tributaries; and there was a strange sweetness--a melancholy mildness
that touched him--in her acceptance of the altered order.

It marked for himself the flight of time, or at any rate what he was
pleased to think of with irony and pity as the rush of experience; it
having been but the day before yesterday that he sat at her feet and
held on by her garment and was fed by her hand. It was the proportions
that were changed, and the proportions were at all times, he
philosophised, the very conditions of perception, the terms of thought.
It was as if, with her effective little entresol and and her wide
acquaintance, her activities, varieties, promiscuities, the duties and
devotions that took up nine tenths of her time and of which he got,
guardedly, but the side-wind--it was as if she had shrunk to a
secondary element and had consented to the shrinkage with the
perfection of tact. This perfection had never failed her; it had
originally been greater than his prime measure for it; it had kept him
quite apart, kept him out of the shop, as she called her huge general
acquaintance, made their commerce as quiet, as much a thing of the home
alone--the opposite of the shop--as if she had never another customer.
She had been wonderful to him at first, with the memory of her little
entresol, the image to which, on most mornings at that time, his eyes
directly opened; but now she mainly figured for him as but part of the
bristling total--though of course always as a person to whom he should
never cease to be indebted. It would never be given to him certainly
to inspire a greater kindness. She had decked him out for others, and
he saw at this point at least nothing she would ever ask for. She only
wondered and questioned and listened, rendering him the homage of a
wistful speculation. She expressed it repeatedly; he was already far
beyond her, and she must prepare herself