world's walls, those the world's curtains and carpet.
She should be intimate with the great bronze clock
and mantel-ornaments, conspicuously presented in
gratitude and long ago; she should be as one of the
circle of eminent contemporaries, photographed,
engraved, signatured, and in particular framed and
glazed, who made up the rest of the decoration, and
made up as well so much of the human comfort; and
while she thought of all the clean truths, unfringed,
unfingered, that the listening stillness, strained into
pauses and waits, would again and again, for years,
have kept distinct, she also wondered what she would
eventually decide upon to present in gratitude. She
would give something better at least than the brawny
Victorian bronzes. This was precisely an instance
of what she felt he knew of her before he had done
with her: that she was secretly romancing at that
rate, in the midst of so much else that was more
urgent, all over the place. So much for her secrets
with him, none of which really required to be
phrased. It would have been, for example, a secret
for her from any one else that without a dear lady
she had picked up just before coming over she
wouldn't have a decently near connection, of any
sort, for such an appeal as she was making, to put
forward: no one in the least, as it were, to produce
for respectability. But his seeing it she didn't mind a
scrap, and not a scrap either his knowing how she
had left the dear lady in the dark. She had come
alone, putting her friend off with a fraud: giving

[[260]]

p259 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p260w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p261

v?