en waiting to see what I would do. She had ended by sitting down
with her girl on the same row of chairs with myself, and after a little,
the seat next to her becoming vacant, I had gone and stood before
her. She had then looked up at me a moment, staring as if she couldn't
imagine who I was or what I wanted; after which, smiling and extending
her hands, she had broken out: "Ah my dear old friend--what a delight!"
If she had waited to see what I would do in order to choose her own line
she thus at least carried out this line with the utmost grace. She was
cordial, friendly, artless, interested, and indeed I'm sure she was very
glad to see me. I may as well say immediately, none the less, that she
gave me neither then nor later any sign of a desire to contract a loan.
She had scant means--that I learned--yet seemed for the moment able to
pay her way. I took the empty chair and we remained in talk for an hour.
After a while she made me sit at her other side, next her daughter, whom
she wished to know me--to love me--as one of their oldest friends. "It
goes back, back, back, doesn't it?" said Mrs. Pallant; "and of course
she remembers you as a child." Linda smiled all sweetly and blankly, and
I saw she remembered me not a whit. When her mother threw out that they
had often talked about me she failed to take it up, though she looked
extremely nice. Looking nice was her strong point; she was prettier even
than her mother had been. She was such a little lady that she made me
ashamed of having doubted, however vaguely and for a moment, of her
position in the scale of propriety. Her appearance seemed to say that
if she had no acquaintances it was because she didn't want them--because
nobody there struck her as attractive: there wasn't the slightest
difficulty about her choosing her friends. Linda Pallant, young as
she was, and fresh and fair and charming, gentle and sufficiently shy,
looked somehow exclusive--as if the dust of the common world had never
been meant to besprinkle her. She was of thinner consistency than her
mother and clearly not a young woman of professions--except in so far as
she was committed to an interest in you by her bright pure candid smile.
No girl who had such a lovely way of parting her lips could pass for
designing.

As I sat between the pair I felt I had been taken possession of and that
for better or worse my stay at Homburg would be intimately associated
with theirs. We gave each other a great deal