To remain consistent she had always been capable of cutting down more or less her prior term.
Moving for the first time in her life as in the darkening shadow of a false position, she reflected that she should either not have ceased to be right--that is, to be confident--or have recognised that she was wrong; though she tried to deal with herself, for a space, only as a silken-coated spaniel who has scrambled out of a pond and who rattles the water from his ears.

Her shake of her head, again and again, as she went, was much of that order, and she had the resource, to which, save for the rude equivalent of his generalising bark, the spaniel would have been a stranger, of humming to herself hard as a sign that nothing had happened to her.

She had not, so to speak, fallen in; she had had no accident and had not got wet; this at any rate was her pretension until after she began a little to wonder if she mightn't, with or without exposure, have taken cold.

She could at all events remember no time at which she had felt so excited, and certainly none--which was another special point--that so brought with it as well the necessity for concealing excitement.

This birth of a new eagerness became a high pastime, in her view, precisely by reason of the ingenuity required for keeping the thing born out of sight.