“Is not my dress charming, Mr. Brown?” she cries with charming naivete. “Does it not become me?”
“It is as lovely as its wearer,” replied the other, with a suppressed sigh.
“Pouf! What a simile! Who dares compare me with a paltry gown?”
Then, laughing at his discomfiture, the coquette, with slow nonchalance, gathers up her long train.
“But I'll forgive you—this once,” she concedes, “for there is positively no one to take poor little me back to the ballroom.”
And Lady Melissa slips her hand beneath Mr. Brown's arm, and glances up at him with laughing, friendly eyes...
CHAPTER VI. INFLUENCING ARTHUR
No one in Cherryvale ever got a word from Melissa about the true inwardness of the spiritual renaissance she experienced the winter that the Reverend MacGill came to the Methodist church; naturally not her father nor mother nor Aunt Nettie, because grown-ups, though nice and well-meaning, with their inability to “understand,” and their tendency to laugh make one feel shy and reticent about the really deep and vital things. And not even Tess O'Neill, Missy's chum that year, a lively, ingenious, and wonderful girl, was in this case clever enough to obtain complete confidence.
Once before Missy had felt the flame divine—a deep, vague kind of glow all subtly mixed up with “One Sweetly Solemn Thought” and such slow, stirring, minor harmonies, and with sunlight stealing through the stained-glass window above the pulpit in colourful beauty that pierced to her very soul. But that was a long time ago, when she was a little thing—only ten. Now she was nearly sixteen. Things were different. One now was conscious of the reality of inward inexperiences: these must influence life—one's own and, haply, the lives of others. What Missy did not emphasize in her mind was the mystery of how piety evolved from white fox furs and white fox furs finally evolved from piety. But she did perceive that it would be hopeless to try to explain her motives about Arthur as mixed up with the acquisition of the white fox furs... No; not even Tess O'Neill could have grasped the true inwardness of it all.