Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/135

 clean and clear, and so favoured happy certitude that by the time he had advanced a trifle further he was, in addition to everything else we have indicated, aware that, modest as she would indubitably prove, she was neither awkward nor shy, and was in fact quite as inspired and inflamed as himself. She came out from behind her frame, to which she had given a light push, and then it was that her splendid fairness, a complexion white and pink, and that her friendly laughing eyes and full parted lips and thickness of loose brown hair, helped the dress of sprigged muslin which kept as clear of her neck as it did of her elbows to tell him about her, from head to foot—and she was more than middling tall—everything that most pressingly concerned him. There played round him before he took her to his arms the glimmer of a comment kindled at some other flame than that of desire, the wonder of her being rather more imaged for him, and ever so typically, than likely to be, whatever fulness of reality awaited them, possessed by him; which pair of contradictions, however, melted together in the tide of happy intelligence that next flooded and seemed verily almost to drown them. That he should thus on the instant have clasped to his heart and his lips a young woman with whom in all his life he had never yet exchanged a word settled the relation for each alike as soon as it had been so nobly and freely sketched; which was again 121