Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/465

Rh Amherst met Justine again she had been for some months in charge of the little girl, and change and congenial occupation had restored her to a normal view of life. There was no trace in her now of the dumb misery which had haunted him at their parting; she was again the vivid creature who seemed more charged with life than any one he had ever known. The crisis through which she had passed showed itself only in a smoothing of the brow and deepening of the eyes, as though a bloom of experience had veiled without deadening the ﬁrst brilliancy of youth.

As he lingered on the image thus evoked, he recalled Mrs. Dressel’s words: “Justine is twenty-seven—she’s not likely to marry now.”

Oddly enough, he had never thought of her marrying—but now that he heard the possibility questioned, he felt a disagreeable conviction of its inevitableness. Mrs. Dressel’s view was of course absurd. In spite of Justine’s feminine graces, he had formerly felt in her a kind of elﬁn immaturity, as of a flitting Ariel with untouched heart and senses: it was only of late that she had developed the subtle quality which calls up thoughts of love. Not marry? Why, the vagrant ﬁre had just lighted on her—and the fact that she was poor and unattached, with her own way to make, and no setting of pleasure and elegance to embellish her—these disadvantages seemed as nothing to Amherst against the [ 449 ]