By and by I felt that I did not want to talk any more, and fortunately I was left to myself for a time, where I could see the garden, and by turning my head could also see Miriam, her fair hair irradiated by the shaded lamp that stood by the piano.
Soft thoughts began to steal over me—very soft thoughts, and very sweet ones. I thought how delightful it would be to sit every evening like this and listen to Miriam playing; and still more delightful if there should come a time when she would shut the piano and come across the room and put her hand on my shoulder, and look out on to the moonlight lawn and the dark shrubs and the starry sky with me; and neither of us would want to speak, but only to feel that the other was there.
And the night before I had spent in prison, and had not even known that there was such a girl as Miriam!
[CHAPTER XIV]
It was about a week after I had been welcomed into the Perry family that we were all asked to take high tea at the house of Mrs. Perry's sister, the Countess of Blueberry.
The most important thing that had happened in the meantime was that I had fallen deeply in love with Miriam. We had been much together, and our conversations had largely concerned themselves with the curious state of things obtaining in the country from which I had come. Miriam was deeply interested in what I told her, but I had to be very careful. In some respects she became more and more inclined to approve of a country in which wealth might be used to lessen care, instead of increasing it, and in which even the richest were under no cloud of inferiority. The pictures I painted of English life under conditions of monetary ease appealed alike to her natural tastes, of which in Upsidonia she had to be ashamed, if she were to show right feeling, and to the philanthropic ideals in which she had been brought up. She could never get it out of her mind that we showed great nobility of behaviour in treating rich people with a total absence of contempt, and I did not desire that she should, although I insisted upon the fact itself.
But every now and again I came up against a painful shrinking. I had to be extraordinarily careful how I dealt with the subject of food, for instance, and I think that if I had ever described to her a city banquet, or even a college feast, I should have wiped out at a stroke all the admiration she was inclined to show for the habits and customs of my beloved country.
But short as had been the time since I had come to Magnolia Hall, I had already adapted myself somewhat to the Upsidonian point of view—indeed, a good deal more than I should have thought possible.