had her reasons--she wished intensely to discriminate: Basil French
had several times waited on her at her mother's habitation, their
horrible flat which was so much too far up and too near the East Side;
he had dined there and lunched there and gone with her thence to other
places, notably to see pictures, and had in particular adjourned
with her twice to the Metropolitan Museum, in which he took a great
interest, in which she professed a delight, and their second visit
to which had wound up in her encounter with Mr. Pitman, after her
companion had yielded, at her urgent instance, to an exceptional
need of keeping a business engagement. She mightn't, in delicacy,
in decency, entertain Murray Brush where she had entertained Mr.
French--she was given over now to these exquisite perceptions and
proprieties and bent on devoutly observing them; and Mr. French, by
good-luck, had never been with her in the Park: partly because he had
never pressed it, and partly because she would have held off if he
had, so haunted were those devious paths and favoring shades by the
general echo of her untrammelled past. If he had never suggested their
taking a turn there this was because, quite divinably, he held it
would commit him further than he had yet gone; and if she on her side
had practised a like reserve it was because the place reeked for her,
as she inwardly said, with old associations. It reeked with nothing
so much perhaps as with the memories evoked by the young man who now
awaited her in the nook she had been so competent to indicate; but
in what corner of the town, should she look for them, wouldn't those
footsteps creak back into muffled life, and to what expedient would
she be reduced should she attempt to avoid all such tracks? The Museum
was full of tracks, tracks by the hundred--the way really she had
knocked about!--but she had to see people somewhere, and she couldn't
pretend to dodge every ghost.