Oh she was able to say. "Remember how much I was on the way to it
through Mr. Newsome--before I saw you. He thinks everything of your
strength."
"Well, I can bear almost anything!" our friend briskly interrupted.
Deep and beautiful on this her smile came back, and with the effect
of making him hear what he had said just as she had heard it. He
easily enough felt that it gave him away, but what in truth had
everything done but that? It had been all very well to think at
moments that he was holding her nose down and that he had coerced
her: what had he by this time done but let her practically see that
he accepted their relation? What was their relation moreover--
though light and brief enough in form as yet--but whatever she
might choose to make it? Nothing could prevent her--certainly he
couldn't--from making it pleasant. At the back of his head, behind
everything, was the sense that she was--there, before him, close to
him, in vivid imperative form--one of the rare women he had so
often heard of, read of, thought of, but never met, whose very
presence, look, voice, the mere contemporaneous FACT of whom, from
the moment it was at all presented, made a relation of mere
recognition. That was not the kind of woman he had ever found Mrs.
Newsome, a contemporaneous fact who had been distinctly slow to
establish herself; and at present, confronted with Madame de
Vionnet, he felt the simplicity of his original impression of Miss
Gostrey. She certainly had been a fact of rapid growth; but the
world was wide, each day was more and more a new lesson. There were
at any rate even among the stranger ones relations and relations.
"Of course I suit Chad's grand way," he quickly added. "He hasn't
had much difficulty in working me in."
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