"I don't like superior persons." "Ah," thought Corinna, watching her closely, "she is really interested, poor child!" After this the girl went out into a changed world--into a world which had become, as if by a miracle, less impersonal and unfriendly.

The amber light of the sunset seemed to envelop her softly as if she were surrounded by happiness.

It was like first love without its troubled suspense, this new wonderful feeling! It was like a religious awakening without the sense of sin that she associated with her early conversion.
Nothing, she felt, could ever be so beautiful again! Nothing could ever mean so much to her in the rest of life! In one moment, almost by magic, she had learned her first lesson in discrimination, in the relative values of experience; she had attained her first clear perception of the difference between the things that mattered a little and the things that mattered profoundly.
The every-day world had faded from her so completely that it seemed a natural incident--it caused her scarcely a start of surprise--when she met Stephen Culpeper under the Washington monument.

He had evidently just left his office, for there was a bulky package of papers in his hand; and he greeted her as if it were the merest accident that had taken him through the Square.

As a matter of fact it was less of an accident than he made it appear, for he had declined to go home in the Judge's car because of some vague hope that by walking he might meet either Patty or Gideon Vetch.