Why FIRST--that had, later on, kept coming to her; the question dangled there as if it were the key to everything.

With the sense of it on the spot, she had felt, overwhelmingly, that she was significant, that so she must instantly strike him, and that this had a kind of violence beyond what she had intended.

It was in fact even at the moment not absent from her view that he might easily have made an abject fool of her--at least for the time.

She had indeed, for just ten seconds, been afraid of some such turn: the uncertainty in his face had become so, the next thing, an uncertainty in the very air.

Three words of impatience the least bit loud, some outbreak of "What in the world are you 'up to', and what do you mean ?" any note of that sort would instantly have brought her low--and this all the more that heaven knew she hadn't in any manner designed to be high.