it came, but it reminded
him of something, he could not think what.

He puzzled over it as he cut the flower stalks, then all at once he
laid hold on the edge of a recollection--a pair of dark eyes, in which
mirthful, mocking lights flickered, as the sun splashes flicker on the
ground under trees--a voice, many-noted as a violin, that grew softest
when it was going to strike hardest, that expressed a hundred things
unsaid.

He looked across at the owner of the carnations, and wondered by what
perversity of fate it was decreed that any one who could buy such good
boots, should have such ill-shaped feet to put into them; and why, if
fate so handicapped her, why she should exhibit them by crossing her
knees. He also wondered what possessed her to wear that hat; every
other well-dressed girl had a variation of the style that year, it was
the correctest of the correct for fashion, but he did not take note of
that. Men are rather blockheaded on the subject of fashion, and seldom
see the charm in the innately unbecoming and unsuitable, no matter
what decrees it.

He looked back to the empty opposite corner, and, though until that
moment he had not really thought of Julia since he left Mr. Gillat
yesterday, he put her there in imagination now. He did not want her
there, he did not want her anywhere (there are some wines which a man
does not want, that still rather spoil his taste for others). She
would not have made the mistake of wearing such a hat; her clothes
were not new, they were distinctly shabby sometimes, but they were
well assorted. As to the boots--he remembered the day he tied her
shoe--he could imagine the man she married, if he were very young and
very foolish, of course, finding a certain pleasure in taking her
arched foot, when it was pink and bare, in the hollow of his hand. If
she were in that corner now, the quiet, twinkling smile would
certainly be on her face as she listened to the talk of books, and
men, and places, and things. He did not picture her joining even when
they spoke of things she knew, and places she had been to--he
remembered he had once heard her speak of a town which had been
spoken of this afternoon. She had somehow grasped the whole life of
the place, and laid it bare to him in a few words--the light-hearted
gaiety and the sordid misery, the black superstition and the towering
history which overhung it, and the cheerful commonplace which, like
the street cries and the gutter streams,