ways so strangely interesting; so that I kept wondering what she
would say or do next to surprise and please me. Not, indeed, that
there was anything startling in what she actually said or did; but it
was all done in a new way, and always with that indefinable interest
and pleasure of life, which I had noticed more or less in everybody,
but which in her was more marked and more charming than in anyone
else that I had seen.

We were soon under way and going at a fair pace through the beautiful
reaches of the river, between Bensington and Dorchester. It was now
about the middle of the afternoon, warm rather than hot, and quite
windless; the clouds high up and light, pearly white, and gleaming,
softened the sun's burning, but did not hide the pale blue in most
places, though they seemed to give it height and consistency; the
sky, in short, looked really like a vault, as poets have sometimes
called it, and not like mere limitless air, but a vault so vast and
full of light that it did not in any way oppress the spirits. It was
the sort of afternoon that Tennyson must have been thinking about,
when he said of the Lotos-Eaters' land that it was a land where it
was always afternoon.

Ellen leaned back in the stern and seemed to enjoy herself
thoroughly. I could see that she was really looking at things and
let nothing escape her, and as I watched her, an uncomfortable
feeling that she had been a little touched by love of the deft,
ready, and handsome Dick, and that she had been constrained to follow
us because of it, faded out of my mind; since if it had been so, she
surely could not have been so excitedly pleased, even with the
beautiful scenes we were passing through. For some time she did not
say much, but at last, as we had passed under Shillingford Bridge