uite in abeyance: therefore he was free to feel also
that his imagination had been rather starved by his ignorance of the
fact that she was near him again (comparatively), that she was in the
dimness of the horizon (no longer beyond the curve of the globe), and
yet he had not perceived it. This sense of personal loss, as I have
called it, made him feel, further, that he had something to make up, to
recover. He could scarcely have told you how he would go about it; but
the idea, formless though it was, led him in a direction very different
from the one he had been following a quarter of an hour before. As he
watched it dance before him he fell into another silence, in the midst
of which Mrs. Luna gave him another mystic smile. The effect of it was
to make him rise to his feet; the whole landscape of his mind had
suddenly been illuminated. Decidedly, it was _not_ his duty to marry
Mrs. Luna, in order to have means to pursue his studies; he jerked
himself back, as if he had been on the point of it.

"You don't mean to say you are going already? I haven't said half I
wanted to!" she exclaimed.

He glanced at the clock, saw it was not yet late, took a turn about the
room, then sat down again in a different place, while she followed him
with her eyes, wondering what was the matter with him. Ransom took good
care not to ask her what it was she had still to say, and perhaps it was
to prevent her telling him that he now began to talk, freely, quickly,
in quite a new tone. He stayed half an hour longer, and made himself
very agreeable. It seemed to Mrs. Luna now that he had every distinction
(she had known he had most), that he was really a charming man. He
abounded in conversation, till at last he took up his hat in earnest; he
talked about the state of the South, its social peculiarities, the ruin
wrought by the war, the dilapidated gentry, the queer types of
superannuated fire-eaters, ragged and unreconciled, all the pathos and
all the comedy of it, making her laugh at one moment, almost cry at
another, and say to herself throughout that when he took it into his
head there was no one who could make a lady's evening pass so
pleasantly. It was only afterwards that she asked herself why he had not
taken it into his head till the last, so quickly. She delighted in the
dilapidated gentry; her taste was completely different from her
sister's, who took an interest only in the lower class, as it struggled
to rise; what Adeline cared