free, more intense, more full of amusing
incident and opportunity. She could stop and look at everything now, and
indulge all her curiosities, even the most childish; she could feel as
if she were out for the day, though she was not really--as she had not
done since she was a little girl, when in the country, once or twice,
when her father and mother had drifted into summer quarters, gone out of
town like people of fashion, she had, with a chance companion, strayed
far from home, spent hours in the woods and fields, looking for
raspberries and playing she was a gipsy. Basil Ransom had begun with
proposing, strenuously, that she should come somewhere and have
luncheon; he had brought her out half an hour before that meal was
served in West Tenth Street, and he maintained that he owed her the
compensation of seeing that she was properly fed; he knew a very quiet,
luxurious French restaurant, near the top of the Fifth Avenue: he didn't
tell her that he knew it through having once lunched there in company
with Mrs. Luna. Verena for the present declined his hospitality--said
she was going to be out so short a time that it wasn't worth the
trouble; she should not be hungry, luncheon to her was nothing, she
would eat when she went home. When he pressed her she said she would see
later, perhaps, if she should find she wanted something. She would have
liked immensely to go with him to an eating-house, and yet, with this,
she was afraid, just as she was rather afraid, at bottom, and in the
intervals of her quick pulsations of amusement, of the whole expedition,
not knowing why she had come, though it made her happy, and reflecting
that there was really nothing Mr. Ransom could have to say to her that
would concern her closely enough. He knew what he intended about her
sharing the noon-day repast with him somehow; it had been part of his
plan that she should sit opposite him at a little table, taking her
napkin out of its curious folds--sit there smiling back at him while he
said to her certain things that hummed, like memories of tunes, in his
fancy, and they waited till something extremely good, and a little
vague, chosen out of a French _carte_, was brought them. That was not at
all compatible with her going home at the end of half an hour, as she
seemed to expect to. They visited the animals in the little zoological
garden which forms one of the attractions of the Central Park; they
observed the swans in the ornamental water, a