This was her first departure from home, and the ease,
freedom, and beloved old ways of home-life, assumed more of their true
value in her eyes. She had acquired a sentiment of awe for Aunt
Margaret's grandeur. She would be obliged to sleep in corsets and
high-heeled shoes; everybody would be going through the figures of a
stately minuet all day long.
Then she began to feel in advance the wrench of separating from those
with whom her life had been spent, and from one other in whose company
she had lived more--so it seemed to her--than in all the years since she
ceased to be a child. Bressant was very prominent in her thoughts; nor
could she be blamed for this, for the short acquaintance bad been
emphasized by a disproportional number of memorable events: First, there
was the thunder-storm evening by the fountain; afterward, the dance at
Abbie's; and, following in quick succession, the celestial arch, the
walk homeward, and the catastrophe in which he had borne the chief part.
Besides, he was so different from common men.
"So perfectly natural and unaffected," she argued to herself. "He means
all he says; of course I shouldn't let him say such things to me as he
does if it weren't so; but it would be affectation in me to object to
it as it is!"--a most plausible deduction, by-the-way, but dangerous to
act upon.
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