All she could do was not to make confusion, make mixtures, of the
living; though she asked herself enough what mixture she mightn't find
herself to have prepared if Mr. French should, not so very impossibly,
for a restless, roaming man--_her_ effect on him!--happen to pass
while she sat there with the mustachioed personage round whose name
Mrs. Maule would probably have caused detrimental anecdote most
thickly to cluster. There existed, she was sure, a mass of luxuriant
legend about the "lengths" her engagement with Murray Brush had gone;
she could herself fairly feel them in the air, these streamers of
evil, black flags flown as in warning, the vast redundancy of so cheap
and so dingy social bunting, in fine, that flapped over the stations
she had successively moved away from and which were empty now, for
such an ado, even to grotesqueness. The vivacity of that conviction
was what had at present determined her, while it was the way he
listened after she had quickly broken ground, while it was the special
character of the interested look in his handsome face, handsomer than
ever yet, that represented for her the civilization he had somehow
taken on. Just so it was the quantity of that gain, in its turn, that
had at the end of ten minutes begun to affect her as holding up a
light to the wide reach of her step. "There was never anything the
least serious between us, not a sign or a scrap, do you mind? of
anything beyond the merest pleasant friendly acquaintance; and if
you're not ready to go to the stake on it for me you may as well know
in time what it is you'll probably cost me."

She had immediately plunged, measuring her effect and having thought
it well over; and what corresponded to her question of his having
become a better person to appeal to was the appearance of interest she
had so easily created in him. She felt on the spot the difference that
made--it was indeed his form of being more civilized: it was the