She felt intuitively that he saw straight through her little subterfuge of the flowers, that he divined her girlish worship at the shrine of Cynthia, and was making fun of her.
"Do you object to a cigar, Miss Brewster ?" asked Robert, and Risley looked inquiringly at her.
"Oh, no," replied Ellen, with the eager readiness of a child to fit into new conditions.

She thought of the sitting-room at home, blue with the rank pipe-smoke of Nahum Beals and his kind.

She pictured them to herself sitting about on these warm evenings in their shirt-sleeves, and she saw the two gentlemen in their light summer clothes with their fragrant cigars at their lips, and all of a sudden she realized that between these men and the others there was a great gulf, and that she was trying to cross it.

She did not realize, as later, that the gulf was one of externals, and of width rather than depth, but it seemed to her then that from one shore she could only see dimly the opposite.

A great fear and jealousy came over her as to her own future accessibility to those of the other kind among whom she had been brought up, like her father and Granville.
Ellen felt all this as she sat beside Cynthia, who was casting about in her mind, in rather an annoyed fashion, for something to say to this young beneficiary of hers which should not have anything to do with the benefit.
Finally she inquired if she were having a pleasant vacation, and Ellen replied that she was.