un-suffused world at her feet. Was it
love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts
and sensations? How much of it was owing to the spell of the perfect
afternoon, the scent of the fading woods, the thought of the dulness she
had fled from? Lily had no definite experience by which to test the
quality of her feelings. She had several times been in love with
fortunes or careers, but only once with a man. That was years ago, when
she first came out, and had been smitten with a romantic passion for a
young gentleman named Herbert Melson, who had blue eyes and a little wave
in his hair. Mr. Melson, who was possessed of no other negotiable
securities, had hastened to employ these in capturing the eldest Miss Van
Osburgh: since then he had grown stout and wheezy, and was given to
telling anecdotes about his children. If Lily recalled this early emotion
it was not to compare it with that which now possessed her; the only
point of comparison was the sense of lightness, of emancipation, which
she remembered feeling, in the whirl of a waltz or the seclusion of a
conservatory, during the brief course of her youthful romance. She had
not known again till today that lightness, that glow of freedom; but now
it was something more than a blind groping of the blood. The peculiar
charm of her feeling for Selden was that she understood it; she could put
her finger on every link of the chain that was drawing them together.
Though his popularity was of the quiet kind, felt rather than actively
expressed among his friends, she had never mistaken his inconspicuousness
for obscurity. His reputed cultivation was generally regarded as a slight
obstacle to easy intercourse, but Lily, who prided herself on her
broad-minded recognition of literature, and always carried an Omar Khayam
in her travelling-bag, was attracted by this attribute, which she felt
would have had its distinction in an older society. It was, moreover, one
of his gifts to look his part; to have a height which lifted his head
above the crowd, and the keenly-modelled dark features which, in a land
of amorphous types, gave him the air of belonging to a more specialized
race, of carrying the impress of a concentrated past. Expansive persons
found him a little dry, and very young girls thought him sarcastic; but
this air of friendly aloofness, as far removed as possible from any
assertion of personal advantage, was the quality which piqued Lily's
interest. Ev