al intrusion of the idea that she had not been true to herself
in letting her just anger die so quickly away.

If Farnham could have seen into the proud and honest heart of the young
girl he was talking to, he would have rested on the field he had won,
and not tempted a further adventure. Her anger against him had been
dissipated by the very effort she had made to give it effect, and she
had fallen insensibly into the old relation of good neighborhood and
unreserved admiration with which she had always regarded him. She had
silenced her scruples by the thought that in talking pleasantly with
him she was obeying her mother, and that after all it was not her
business to judge him. If he could have known his own best interest, he
would have left her then, when her voice and her smile had become gay
and unembarrassed according to their wont, with her conscience at ease
about his faults, and her mind filled with a pleasant memory of his
visit.

But such wisdom was beyond his reach. He had felt suddenly, and once
for all, in the last hour, the power and visible presence of his love.
He had never in his life been so moved by any passion as he was by the
joy that stirred his heart when he heard the rustle of her dress in the
hall and saw her white hand resting lightly on the dark wood of the
stairs. As she walked into the parlor, from her face and her hair, from
every movement of her limbs, from every flutter of her soft and gauzy
garments, there came to him an assertion of her power over him that
filled him with a delicious awe. She represented to him, as he had
never felt it before, the embodied mystery and majesty of womanhood.
During all the long conversation that had followed, he had been
conscious of a sort of dual operation of his mind, like that familiar
to the eaters of hashish. With one part of him he had been carrying on
a light and shallow conversation, as an excuse to remain in her
presence and to keep his eyes upon her, and with all the more active
energies of his being he had been giving himself up to an act of
passionate adoration of her. The thoughts that uttered themselves to
him, as he chatted about all sorts of indifferent things, were
something like these: How can it have ever happened that such beauty,
such dignity, such physical perfection could come together in one
person, and the best and sweetest heart have met them there? If she
knew her value, her pride would ruin her. In her there is everything,
a