He was sure--sure for himself, always, whatever his idea: the expression of that in him had somehow never appeared more identical with his proved taste for the rare and the true.

But what stood out beyond everything was that he was always, marvellously, young--which couldn't but crown, at this juncture, his whole appeal to her imagination.

Before she knew it she was lifted aloft by the consciousness that he was simply a great and deep and high little man, and that to love him with tenderness was not to be distinguished, a whit, from loving him with pride.

It came to her, all strangely, as a sudden, an immense relief.

The sense that he wasn't a failure, and could never be, purged their predicament of every meanness--made it as if they had really emerged, in their transmuted union, to smile almost without pain.