It is not the spectacle itself that matters to her--poor Eleanor! One heart-beat, one smile of the man beside her outweighs it all.

And he, roused at last from his nonchalance, watching hawk-like every movement of the figure and the crowd, is going mentally through a certain page of his book, repeating certain phrases--correcting here--strengthening there.
Lucy alone--the alien and Puritan Lucy--Lucy surrenders herself completely.
She betrays nothing, save by the slightly parted lips, and the flutter of the black veil fastened on her breast; but it is as though her whole inner being were dissolving, melting away, in the flame of the moment.

It is her first contact with decisive central things, her first taste of the great world-play, as Europe has known it and taken part in it, at least since Charles the Great.
Yet, as she looks, within the visible scene, there opens another: the porch of a plain, shingled house, her uncle sitting within it, his pipe and his newspaper on his knee, sunning himself in the April morning.

She passes behind him, looks into the stiff leaf-scented parlour--at the framed Declaration of Independence on the walls, the fresh boughs in the fire-place, the Bible on its table, the rag-carpet before the hearth.
She breathes the atmosphere of the house; its stern independence and simplicities; the scorns and the denials, the sturdy freedoms both of body and soul that it implies--conscience the only master--vice-master for God, in this His house of the World.

And beyond--as her lids sink for an instant on the pageant before her--she hears, as it were, the voices of her country, so young and raw and strong!--she feels within her the throb of its struggling self-assertive life; she is conscious too of the uglinesses and meannesses that belong to birth and newness, to growth and fermentation.