He knew in advance he should look back on the
perception actually sharpest with him as on the view of something
old, old, old, the oldest thing he had ever personally touched;
and he also knew, even while he took his companion in as the feature
among features, that memory and fancy couldn't help being enlisted
for her. She might intend what she would, but this was beyond anything
she could intend, with things from far back--tyrannies of history,
facts of type, values, as the painters said, of expression--
all working for her and giving her the supreme chance, the chance
of the happy, the really luxurious few, the chance, on a great
occasion, to be natural and simple. She had never, with him,
been more so; or if it was the perfection of art it would never--
and that came to the same thing--be proved against her.
What was truly wonderful was her way of differing so from time to
time without detriment to her simplicity. Caprices, he was sure
she felt, were before anything else bad manners, and that judgement
in her was by itself a thing making more for safety of intercourse
than anything that in his various own past intercourses he had had
to reckon on. If therefore her presence was now quite other than
the one she had shown him the night before, there was nothing of
violence in the change--it was all harmony and reason.
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