vivacity of discussion
with Waymarsh. It was an immense thing, quite a tremendous thing, for her to
have come: this truth opened out to him in spite of his having already arrived
for himself at a fairly vivid view of it. He had done exactly what he had given
Waymarsh his word for - had walked and re-walked the court while he awaited her
advent; acquiring in this exercise an amount of light that affected him at the
time as flooding the scene. She had decided upon the step in order to give him
the benefit of a doubt, in order to be able to say to her mother that she had,
even to abjectness, smoothed the way for him. The doubt had been as to whether
he mightn't take her as not having smoothed it - and the admonition had possibly
come from Waymarsh's more detached spirit. Waymarsh had at any rate, certainly,
thrown his weight into the scale - he had pointed to the importance of depriving
their friend of a grievance. She had done justice to the plea, and it was to set
herself right with a high ideal that she actually sat there in her state. Her
calculation was sharp in the immobility with which she held her tall
parasol-stick upright and at arm's length, quite as if she had struck the place
to plant her flag; in the separate precautions she took not to show as nervous;
in the aggressive repose in which she did quite nothing but wait for him. Doubt
ceased to be possible from the moment he had taken in that she had arrived with
no proposal whatever; that her concern was simply to show what she had come to
receive. She had come to receive his submission, and Waymarsh was to have made
it plain to him that she would expect nothing less. He saw fifty things, her
host, at this convenient stage; but one of those he most saw was that their
anxious friend hadn't quite had the hand required of him. Waymarsh had, however,
uttered the request that she might find him mild, and while hanging about the
court before her arrival he had turned over with zeal the different ways in
which he could be so. The difficulty was that if he was mild he wasn't, for her
purpose, conscious. If she wished him conscious - as everything about her cried
aloud that she did - she must accordingly be at costs to make him so. Conscious
he was, for himself - but only of too many things; so she must choose the one
she required.
    Practically, however, it at last got