At first she patted herself on the back, so to speak, for her circumspection. She was behaving with wisdom and discretion, and with a due sense of self-respect. But on the second day, when she had had no more than half-a-dozen words with him, she returned to her home with her heart full of him, and feeling the meanness of her circumspection—hating her caution and abhorring her discretion. When she was combing out her hair that night, she caught sight of herself, as she had done before upon one occasion that has been noticed, in the tall glass, but this time she seemed to have a glimpse of a strange girl in whom she was greatly interested. She looked at herself curiously through that fine network of hair that flowed around her, covering the white draping of her white shoulders with a miraculous lacework of silk. And then, in the impulse of a thought that suggested an instinct, she unfastened the button of her drapery and allowed it to fall down about her feet so that she stood there a warm white figure of a bather ready for the plunge into the water, the foam of which was coiled about her ankles.
She looked at her reflection shyly as though she had surprised a strange girl. But the strange shyness gave way to a strange interest in that figure before her. She seemed to have acquired an interest in her body from her head to her feet such as she had never known before, and she found herself actually posing before the glass. Only for a minute, however; with a little laugh that had something of maidenly merriment in it and the rest of maidenly passion, she flung her hair away from her figure and rushed to her bed.
She did not go to sleep for a long time. The window of her room was open and she could hear faintly the notes of the nightingale that was singing in a plantation beyond the orchard.
And somehow the song of the nightingale also seemed quite new to her. She could not understand how it was that she had ever thought of it as sad.
She turned rosy when he asked her if she would pay his mother a visit, and she did not answer him at once.
“Did you tell your mother who I am—what I am?” she enquired, without looking at him.
“She knows all about you,” he replied.
“And are you sure that she wishes to see me?”
He did not answer at once. At last he said,
“I don’t think that she wants particularly to see you. She doesn’t care a great deal for seeing strangers. But I wish her to see you, and I wish you to see her.”