"I'm very glad it's took your fancy to come here sometimes, Miss Lyon. I know you're thought to hold your head high, but I speak of people as I find 'em. And I'm sure anybody had need be humble that comes where there's a floor like this—for I've put by my best tea-trays, they're so out of all character—I must look Above for comfort now; but I don't say I'm not worthy to be called on for all that."
Felix had risen and moved toward the door that he might open it and shield Esther from more last words on his mother's part.
"Good-bye, Mr. Holt."
"Will Mr. Lyon like for me to sit with him an hour this evening, do you think?"
"Why not? He always likes to see you."
"Then I will come. Good-bye."
"She's a very straight figure," said Mrs. Holt. "How she carries herself! But I doubt there's some truth in what our people say. If she won't look at young Muscat, it's the better for him. He'd need have a big fortune that marries her."
"That's true, mother," said Felix, sitting down, snatching up little Job, and finding a vent for some unspeakable feeling in the pretence of worrying him.
Esther was rather melancholy as she went home, yet happier withal than she had been for many days before. She thought, "I need not mind having shown so much anxiety about his opinion. He is too clear-sighted to mistake our mutual position; he is quite above putting a false interpretation on what I have done. Besides, he had not thought of me at all—I saw that plainly enough. Yet he was very kind. There is something greater and better in him than I had imagined. His behavior to-day—to his mother and me too—I should call it the highest gentlemanliness, only it seems in him to be something deeper. But he has chosen an intolerable life; though I suppose, if I had a mind equal to his, and if he loved me very dearly, I should choose the same life."
Esther felt that she had prefixed an impossible "if" to that result. But now she had known Felix her conception of what a happy love must be had become like a dissolving view, in which the once-dear images were gradually melting into new forms and new colors. The favorite Byronic heroes were beginning to look like last night's decorations seen in the sober dawn. So fast does a little leaven spread within us—so incalculable is one personality on another. Behind all Esther's thoughts, like an unacknowledged yet constraining presence, there was the sense, that if Felix Holt were to love her, her life would be exalted into something quite new—into a sort of difficult blessedness, such as one may imagine in beings who are conscious of painfully growing into possession of higher powers.