The transformation in her was electric. She ceased to be starched and competent, with a manner that put a thousand miles between him and her. The intelligence he had already noted in her face was aflame with a radiance beyond beauty.
"Oh, I'm so glad you can say that! No one outside the family has ever said it before. He's a lamb!—and hardly anybody knows it."
She held out her hand again. As he took it he saw that her eyes, which he thought must be dark, were shining with a mist of tears.
Going down the hill he repeated the two names: Maisie Danker! Hildred Ansley! They called up concepts so different that it was hard to think them of a common flesh. Though Maisie Danker was a woman and Hildred Ansley but a child, there were points at which you could compare them. In the comparison the advantages lay so richly with the girl in Louisburg Square that he fell back on the fact, stressing it with emphasis, that Maisie was the prettier. "After all," he reflected, with comfort in the judgment, "that's all that matters—to a man."
XXV
A few days after his rescue of Guy Ansley from the snow Tom Whitelaw found himself addressed by that young gentleman's sister, aged fourteen. She had plainly been watching for him as he went through Louisburg Square on his way from school. He had almost passed the Ansley steps before the tall, slight girl ran down them.
"Oh, Mr. Whitelaw!"
As it was the first time he had ever been honored with this prefix, he felt shocked and slightly foolish.