gave me neither then nor later any sign of a desire to contract a loan.
She had scant means--that I learned--yet seemed for the moment able to
pay her way. I took the empty chair and we remained in talk for an hour.
After a while she made me sit at her other side, next her daughter, whom
she wished to know me--to love me--as one of their oldest friends. "It
goes back, back, back, doesn't it?" said Mrs. Pallant; "and of course
she remembers you as a child." Linda smiled all sweetly and blankly, and
I saw she remembered me not a whit. When her mother threw out that they
had often talked about me she failed to take it up, though she looked
extremely nice. Looking nice was her strong point; she was prettier even
than her mother had been. She was such a little lady that she made me
ashamed of having doubted, however vaguely and for a moment, of her
position in the scale of propriety. Her appearance seemed to say that if
she had no acquaintances it was because she didn't want them--because
nobody there struck her as attractive: there wasn't the slightest
difficulty about her choosing her friends. Linda Pallant, young as she
was, and fresh and fair and charming, gentle and sufficiently shy,
looked somehow exclusive--as if the dust of the common world had never
been meant to besprinkle her. She was of thinner consistency than her
mother and clearly not a young woman of professions--except in so far as
she was committed to an interest in you by her bright pure candid smile.
No girl who had such a lovely way of parting her lips could pass for
designing.

As I sat between the pair I felt I had been taken possession of and that
for better or worse my stay at Homburg would be intimately associated
with theirs. We gave each other a great deal of news and expressed
unlimited interest in each other's history since our last meeting. I
mightn't judge of what Mrs. Pallant kept back, but for myself I quite
overflowed. She let me see at any rate that her life had been a good