What is it? Who shall describe it? I fancy it is one of the ways in which the soul looks out from its prison-house of clay. Yet who will undertake to describe a soul?
She was looking down and smiling at, and bowing to Phil on the street below, while he tarried in the frosty air to execute a series of bows, extravagant in their burlesque of profound respect; also he was at intervals tossing up delicate balls of the soft snow, which it amused him to see her dodge, though the glass protected her from their touch.
"Throw up the sash," he shouted, "and crown your hair with ermine!"
But she shook her head merrily, albeit there was a wistful look in her eye, and she would have liked nothing better than to have gone down, coated and mittened, and had a snow-frolic in the street.
Had it been some friendly back-yard, instead of one of the public thoroughfares, or had they been seven and ten, instead of seventeen and twenty, she would have gone in a minute.
And then she gave one of those flitting sighs to her happy past, which is all that a happy girl of seventeen ever troubles herself about her past.
She sighed again, though, and her face grew grave with a sweet, sad gravity, born of something deeper than the desire for a snow-frolic; and as she looked after the handsome young fellow, who had used up his brief space of time in fun, and was now striding rapidly toward the bank, to get there before the clock struck nine, she said aloud, and wistfully:
"If I could only coax him to go with me! It might be a beginning of something better. It would certainly be better than what he is doing now. Mr. Easton is so interesting; I am almost certain he would enjoy it if he could once form the habit of going."
Not all of this aloud. After the first slow, wistful sentence, she went over the rest in her own thoughts, as she had done often and often before, and advanced no farther toward a solution; for her face did not clear as she arose and went about arranging the ribbons and laces in her drawer.
There was need for anxious thought. At least, so it seemed to Daisy Morris, Phil's cousin, and so it seemed to Aunt Mattie, Phil's mother.