Alboni,--"and that demure little prig, too! who'd have thought it?"

As for Simon Blount, he was quick to perceive the new experience to
which the skimped delaine had been introduced, and at first it
disturbed and embarrassed him; but his light, elastic temper soon
recovered its careless buoyancy, with a sly smile at what he
considered an oddity, newly discovered, in the character of his
prim sweetheart. "Oh! it's all right, of course," he thought;
"Sally knows what she's about; but it's very funny!"

And so, if this strange disturbing of the established order of
"things" in the kingdom of Wimple had rested with the exaltation of
the Hoop, that body politic would presently have been reduced to
tranquillity, no doubt, and the all-agogness of Hendrik would have
come quietly to nought, like any other popular flutter following
upon a new thing under the sun. But in a romantic cause the
conscientiousness of Miss Wimple, for all her seeming matter-of-fact,
took on a quality of chivalry; and she displayed a Quixotism most
tiltfully disposed toward any windmill of conventional proprieties
that might plant itself in the way by which her beauteous and
distressed damsel was to escape. So, before all the decencies of
Hendrik had recovered from the shock of the Hoop, she threw them
into a new and worse "conniption" by an even more daring innovation
upon their good, easy notions of her; for the next thing she did
was--a basque and flounces. Thus it happened:--

Madeline had become quite another Madeline,--say a Magdalen, rather,
--under the gentle discipline of her admirable angel. Her wonted
distraction had subsided into a pensive sadness, which manifested
itself in many a grateful, graceful tenderness toward that glorifier
of the skimped delaine. She had observed the Hoop at once, and
greeted it with a solitary smile, accepting it for a happy sign and
a token; for she had recognized Simon Blount when she turned into
the shop, that night, out of the darkness and the cold, and, with
the alert intelligence of a woman, even so self-absorbed as she was
then, had construed his gallant "good-night." She thought she
understood Miss Wimple's Hoop, because she had not discovered the
poetry in Miss Wimple's quilted petticoat. They had not spoken of
those things again. Delicacy was the law for those two; and to do
their best, and thankfully, bravely, accept the first deliverance
Heaven might send them, was their religion. Like two Micawber