It was an immense thing,
quite a tremendous thing, for her to have come: this truth opened
out to him in spite of his having already arrived for himself at a
fairly vivid view of it. He had done exactly what he had given
Waymarsh his word for--had walked and re-walked the court while he
awaited her advent; acquiring in this exercise an amount of light
that affected him at the time as flooding the scene. She had
decided upon the step in order to give him the benefit of a doubt,
in order to be able to say to her mother that she had, even to
abjectness, smoothed the way for him. The doubt had been as to
whether he mightn't take her as not having smoothed it--and the
admonition had possibly come from Waymarsh's more detached spirit.
Waymarsh had at any rate, certainly, thrown his weight into the
scale--he had pointed to the importance of depriving their friend
of a grievance. She had done justice to the plea, and it was to
set herself right with a high ideal that she actually sat there in
her state. Her calculation was sharp in the immobility with which
she held her tall parasol-stick upright and at arm's length, quite
as if she had struck the place to plant her flag; in the separate
precautions she took not to show as nervous; in the aggressive
repose in which she did quite nothing but wait for him.
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