"It would be no worse for me to throw my hat in your face!" His attempt at levity was obviously weak; she looked straight into his eyes, with the steady gaze of a simple, earnest nature shocked by a current quite strange to it.

She did not understand him, and she did.
Her fine intuition gathered swiftly together a hundred shreds of impression received from him during their recent growing intimacy.

He was a patrician, as she vaguely made him out, a man of wealth, whose family was great.

He belonged among people of gentle birth and high attainments.

She magnified him so that he was diffused in her imagination, as difficult to comprehend as a mist in the morning air--and as beautiful.
"You make fun of me," she said, very deliberately, letting her eyes droop; then she looked up again suddenly and continued, with a certain naive expression of disappointment gathering in her face.