She had even a private formula of gratitude that the thing which happened to everybody, and happened to so many people irrelevantly, should arrive with her in such a glorious defensible, demonstrable sequence.

Toward him it gave her a kind of glad secret advantage; he was loved and he was unaware.

She watched his academic awkwardness in church with the inward tender smile of the eternal habile feminine, and when they met she could have laughed and wept over his straightened sentences and his difficult manner, knowing how little significant they were.

With his eyes upon her and his words offered to her intelligence, she found herself treating his shy formality as the convention it was, a kind of make-believe which she would politely and kindly play up to until he should happily forget it and they could enter upon simpler relations.

She had to play up to it for a long time, but her love made her wonderfully clever and patient; and of course the day came when she had her reward.