had felt, somehow, more at her ease than for months and
months before; she didn't know why, but her time at the Museum, oddly,
had done it; it was as if she hadn't come into so many noble and
beautiful associations, nor secured them also for her boy, secured them
even for her father, only to see them turn to vanity and doubt, turn
possibly to something still worse. "I believed in him again as much as
ever, and I felt how I believed in him," she said with bright, fixed
eyes; "I felt it in the streets as I walked along, and it was as if that
helped me and lifted me up, my being off by myself there, not having,
for the moment, to wonder and watch; having, on the contrary, almost
nothing on my mind."

It was so much as if everything would come out right that she had fallen
to thinking of her father's birthday, had given herself this as a reason
for trying what she could pick up for it. They would keep it at Fawns,
where they had kept it before--since it would be the twenty-first of the
month; and she mightn't have another chance of making sure of something
to offer him. There was always the impossibility, of course, of finding
him anything, the least bit "good," that he wouldn't already, long ago,
in his rummagings, have seen himself--and only not to think a quarter
good enough; this, however, was an old story, and one could not have had
any fun with him but for his sweet theory that the individual gift, the
friendship's offering, was, by a rigorous law of nature, a foredoomed
aberration, and that the more it was so the more it showed, and the more
one cherished it for showing, how friendly it had been. The infirmity
of art was the candour of affection, the grossness of pedigree the
refinement of sympathy; the ugliest objects, in fact, as a general
thing, were the bravest, the tenderest mementos, and, as such, figured
in glass cases apart, worthy doubtless of the home, but not worthy of
the temple--dedicated to the grimacing, not to the clear-faced, gods.
She herself, naturally, through the past years, had come to be much
represented in those receptacles; against the thick, locked panes of
which she still liked to flatten her nose, finding in its place, each
time, everything she had on successive anniversaries tried to believe he
might pretend, at her suggestion, to be put off with, or at least think
curious. She was now ready to try it again: they had always, with
his pleasure in her pretence and her pleasure in his, with