Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/198

192 but one couldn't, all the same, bear on her lightly enough. It was bearing hard; it was bearing as he, in any case, wouldn't bear, to concern himself, in relation to her, with the question of a young man. Odious, really, the question of a young man; one didn't treat such a person as a maid servant suspected of a "follower." And then young men, young men—well, the thing was their business simply, or was, at all events, hers. She was fluttered, fairly fevered—to the point of a little glitter that came and went in her eyes and a pair of pink spots that stayed in her cheeks with the great adventure of dining out, and with the greater one still, possibly, of finding a gentleman whom she must think of as very, very old, a gentleman with eye-glasses, wrinkles, a long, grizzled moustache. She spoke the prettiest English, our friend thought, that he had ever heard spoken, just as he had thought her a few minutes before to be speaking the prettiest French. He wondered almost wistfully if such a sweep of the lyre didn't react on the spirit itself; and his fancy had, in fact, before he knew it, begun so to stray and embroider that he finally found himself, absent and extravagant, sitting with the child in a friendly silence. Only by this time he felt that her flutter had fortunately dropped, and that she was more at her ease. She trusted him, liked him, and it was to come back to him afterwards that she had told him things. She had dipped into the waiting medium at last and found neither surge nor chill—nothing but the small splash she could herself make in the pleasant warmth, nothing but the safety of dipping and dipping again. At the end of the ten minutes he was to spend with her, his impression—with all it had thrown off and all it had taken in—was complete. She had been free, as she knew freedom, partly to show him that, unlike other little persons she knew, she had imbibed that ideal. She was delightfully quaint about herself, but the vision of what she had imbibed was what most held him. It really consisted, he was soon enough to feel, in just one great little matter, the fact that, whatever her nature, she was thoroughly—he had to cast about for the word, but it came—bred. He couldn't, of course, on so short an acquaintance, speak for her nature, but the idea of breeding was what she had meanwhile