ar of his even yet to
some effect of confusion or other inconvenience for her, proving
more alive to the quotable in her, as she had called it, than to the
inexpressible. She had reckoned with the awkwardness of that possible
failure of his measure of her charm, by which his renewed apprehension
of her grosser ornaments, those with which he had most affinity, might
too much profit; but she need have concerned herself as little for his
sensibility on one head as on the other. She had ceased personally,
ceased materially--in respect, as who should say, to any optical or
tactile advantage--to exist for him, and the whole office of his
manner had been the more piously and gallantly to dress the dead
presence with flowers. This was all to his credit and his honor, but
what it clearly certified was that their case was at last not even one
of spirit reaching out to spirit. _He_ had plenty of spirit--had all
the spirit required for his having engaged himself to Miss Lindeck,
into which result, once she had got her head well up again, she read,
as they proceeded, one sharp meaning after another. It was therefore
toward the subtler essence of that mature young woman alone that he
was occupied in stretching; what was definite to him about Julia
Bride being merely, being entirely--which was indeed thereby quite
enough--that she _might_ end by scaling her worldly height. They would
push, they would shove, they would "boost," they would arch both their
straight backs as pedestals for her tiptoe; and at the same time, by
some sweet prodigy of mechanics, she would pull them up and up with
her.

Wondrous things hovered before her in the course of this walk; her
consciousness had become, by an extraordinary turn, a music-box in
which, its lid well down, the most remarkable tunes were sounding. It
played for her ear alone, and the lid, as she might have figured, was
her firm plan of holding out till she got home, of not betraying--to
her companion at least--the extent to which she was demoralized. To
see him think her demoralized by mistrust of the sincerity of the
service to be meddlesomely rendered her by his future wife--she would
have hurled herself publicly into the lake there at their side, would
have splashed, in her beautiful clothes, among the frightened swans,
rather than invite him to that ineptitude. Oh, her sincerity, Mary
Lindeck's--she would be drenched with her sincerity, and she would
be drenched, yes, with _his_; so tha