r, walked up to her where she stood
flushed and eager, and asked her to favor him with her hand in the next
dance.

By this time Letty had got familiar with his presence, had recalled her
former meeting with him, had heard his name spoken by not a few who
evidently liked him, and was quite pleased when he asked her to dance
with him.

In the dance, nothing but commonplaces passed between them; but Tom had
a certain pleasant way of his own in saying the commonest, emptiest
things--an off-hand, glancing, skimming, swallow-like way of brushing
and leaving a thing, as if he "could an' if he would," which made it
seem for the moment as if he had said something: were his companion
capable of discovering the illusion, there was no time; Tom was
instantly away, carrying him or her with him to something else. But
there was better than this--there was poetry, more than one element of
it, in Tom. In the presence of a girl that pleased him, there would
rise in him a poetic atmosphere, full of a rainbow kind of glamour,
which, first possessing himself, passed out from him and called up a
similar atmosphere, a similar glamour, about many of the girls he
talked to. This he could no more help than the grass can help smelling
sweet after the rain.

Tom was a finely projected, well-built, unfinished, barely furnished
house, with its great central room empty, where the devil, coming and
going at his pleasure, had not yet begun to make any great racket.
There might be endless embryonic evil in him, but Letty was aware of no
repellent atmosphere about him, and did not shrink from his advances.
He pleased her, and why should she not be pleased with him? Was it a
fault to be easily pleased? The truer and sweeter any human self, the
readier is it to be pleased with another self--save, indeed, something
in it grate on the moral sense: that jars through the whole harmonious
hypostasy. To Tom, therefore, Letty responded with smiles and pleasant
words, even grateful to such a fine youth for taking notice of her
small self.

The sun had set in a bank of cloud, which, as if he had been a lump of
leaven to it, immediately began to swell and rise, and now hung dark
and thick over the still, warm night. Even the farmers were unobservant
of the change: their crops were all in, they had eaten and drunk
heartily, and were merry, looking on or sharing in the multiform
movement, their eyes filled with light and color.

Suddenly came a torrent-sound i