knowledge of two or three of the most popular of them. Her answers,
however, were so superficial and irrelevant, and also so evidently
embarrassed, that he saw his only resources to be society chit-chat,
gossip about mutual acquaintances, the latest modes, the attractions
of pleasure resorts in the city, and of summer resorts in the country.
But he gave his mind to these unwonted themes, and labored hard to
be entertaining; for now that he had gained the vantage-ground he
sought, he was determined to discover whether there was a sleeping
mind or a vacuum behind Miss Mayhew's shapely forehead. Granting
that there was a womanly intelligence there, as yet unquickened,
he was not so irrational as to imagine he could jostle it into
illumining activity in one short hour, or day, or week. But it
seemed to him that if any mind existed worth the name, it would
give such encouraging signs of life before many days passed as
would promise success of his experiment. He felt that his first
aim must be to establish an intimacy that would permit as full
and frank an exchange of thought as was possible between people so
dissimilar.

While he tried to bring himself down to the littleness of her daily
life, he determined to show his disapproval of every phrase of its
meanness as far as he could without offending her. He had made her
feel that he condemned her course towards Miss Burton that evening,
and he had meant to do so.

She resented this disapproval, and at the same time respected him
for it. Indeed he puzzled her. He evidently sought and wished
for her society; and yet as they walked back and forth, even though
she did not look at him when the light gave her the opportunity
to do so, she felt intuitively that he did not enjoy her company.