with almost no inward, but with the finest outward
resonance.

Susan Shepherd's word for her, again and again,
was that she was " large "; yet it was not exactly a
case, as to the soul, of echoing chambers: she might
have been likened rather to a capacious receptacle,
originally perhaps loose, but now drawn as tightly
as possible over its accumulated contents a packed
mass, for her American admirer, of curious detail.
When the latter good lady, at home, had handsomely
figured her friends as not small which was the way
she mostly figured them there was a certain impli
cation that they were spacious because they were
empty. Mrs. Lowder, by a different law, was spa
cious because she was full, because she had some
thing in common, even in repose, with a projectile,
of great size, loaded and ready for use. That in
deed, to Susie's romantic mind, announced itself as
half the charm of their renewal a charm as of sit
ting in springtime, during a long peace, on the
daisied, grassy bank of some great slumbering for
tress. True to her psychological instincts, certainly,
Mrs. Stringham had noted that the " sentiment"
she rejoiced in on her old schoolmate's part was all
a matter of action and movement, was not, save for
the interweaving of a more frequent plump " dear
est " than she would herself perhaps have used, a
matter of much other embroidery. She brooded,
with interest, on this further remark of race, feeling
in her own spirit a different economy. The joy, for

[[187]]

p186 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p187w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p188

v?