er to leave her so at her ease
for appearing to offer _him_ everything?--so free to be quite divinely
gentle with him, to hover there before him in all her mild, bright,
smooth sublimity and to say: "I should be so very grateful if you'd come
to see me."

There succeeded this a space of time of which he was afterward to lose
all account, was never to recover the history; his only coherent view
of it being that an interruption, some incident that kept them a while
separate, had then taken place, yet that during their separation, of
half an hour or whatever, they had still somehow not lost sight of each
other, but had found their eyes meeting, in deep communion, all across
the great peopled room; meeting and wanting to meet, wanting--it was the
most extraordinary thing in the world for the suppression of stages, for
confessed precipitate intensity--to use together every instant of the
hour that might be left them. Yet to use it for what?--unless, like
beautiful fabulous figures in some old-world legend, for the frankest
and almost the crudest avowal of the impression they had made on each
other. He couldn't have named, later on, any other person she had during
this space been engaged with, any more than he was to remember in the
least what he had himself ostensibly done, who had spoken to him, whom
he had spoken to, or whether he hadn't just stood and publicly gaped or
languished.

Ah, Olympians were unconventional indeed--that was a part of their
high bravery and privilege; but what it also appeared to attest in this
wondrous manner was that they could communicate to their chosen in three
minutes, by the mere light of their eyes, the same shining cynicism. He
was to wonder of course, tinglingly enough, whether he had really made
an ass of himself, and there was this amount of evidence for it that
there certainly _had_ been a series of moments each one of which glowed
with the lucid sense that, as she couldn't like him as much as _that_
either for his acted clap-trap or for his printed verbiage, what it must
come to was that she liked him, and to such a tune, just for himself
and quite after no other fashion than that in which every goddess in
the calendar had, when you came to look, sooner or later liked some
prepossessing young shepherd. The question would thus have been, for
him, with a still sharper eventual ache, of whether he positively _had_,
as an effect of the miracle, been petrified, before fifty pair of eyes,