Page:Watch and Ward (Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878).djvu/92

Rh girlish frankness. She was dressed in a light silk dress; she seemed a young woman grown. "I have been growing hard in all these years," she said. "I have had to catch up with those pieds énormes." The readers will not have forgotten that Hubert had thus qualified her lower members. Ignorant as she was, at the moment, of the French tongue, her memory had instinctively retained the words, and she had taken an early opportunity to look out pied in the dictionary. Énorme, of course, spoke for itself.

"You must have caught up with them now," Hubert said, laughing. "You are an enormous young lady. I should never have known you." He sat down, asked various questions about Roger, and adjured her to tell him, as he said, "all about herself." The invitation was flattering, but it met only a partial compliance. Unconscious as yet of her own charm, Nora was oppressed by a secret admiration of her companion, whose presence seemed to open a brilliant vista. She compared him with her cousin, and wondered that he should be at once so impressive and so different. She blushed a little, privately, for Fenton, and was not ill pleased to think he was absent. In the light of Hubert's good manners, his admission that he was no gentleman acquired an excessive force. By this thrilling intimation of the diversity of the male sex, the mental pinafore of childhood seemed finally dismissed. Hubert was so frank and friendly, so tenderly and gallantly patronizing, that more than once she felt herself beginning to expand; but then, suddenly, something absent in the tone of his assent, a vague fancy that in the gathering dusk, he was looking at her all at