Miss Harris eyed me calmly.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but it doesn’t seem the same thing somehow. I think you had better leave it to me.’
‘Indeed, I won’t,’ I said; ‘there is too much in it,’ and we smiled across the gulf of our friendly understanding.
I crossed to the mantelpiece and picked up one of the little wet panels. There was that in it which explained my friend’s exultation much more plainly than words.
‘That is what I am to show him tomorrow,’ she exclaimed; ‘I think I have done as he told me. I think it’s pretty right.’
Whether it was pretty right or pretty wrong, she had taken in an extraordinary way an essence out of him. It wasn’t of course good, but his feeling was reflected in it, at once so brilliantly and so profoundly that it was startling to see.
‘Do you think he’ll be pleased?’ she asked, anxiously.
‘I think he’ll be astounded,’ I said, reserving the rest, and she cried in her pleasure, ‘Oh, you dear man!’
‘I see you have taken possession of him,’ I went on.
‘Ah, body and soul,’ Dora rejoined, and it must have been something like that. I could imagine how she did it; with what wiles of simplicity and candid good-fellowship she had drawn him to forgetfulness and response, and how presently his enthusiasm leaped up to answer hers and they had been caught altogether out of the plane of common relations, and he had gone away on that disgraceful bazaar pony with a ratified arrangement to return next day which had been almost taken for granted from the beginning.