She wished
rather to forestall his arrival by a process of conjecture, and to
judge by the expression of her face this attempt gave her plenty to
do. Grave she found herself, and positively more weighted, as by the
experience of the lapse of the year she had spent in seeing the world.
She had ranged, she would have said, through space and surveyed much
of mankind, and was therefore now, in her own eyes, a very different
person from the frivolous young woman from Albany who had begun to
take the measure of Europe on the lawn at Gardencourt a couple of
years before. She flattered herself she had harvested wisdom and
learned a great deal more of life than this light-minded creature
had even suspected. If her thoughts just now had inclined themselves
to retrospect, instead of fluttering their wings nervously about the
present, they would have evoked a multitude of interesting pictures.
These pictures would have been both landscapes and figure-pieces;
the latter, however, would have been the more numerous. With several
of the images that might have been projected on such a field we are
already acquainted. There would be for instance the conciliatory Lily,
our heroine's sister and Edmund Ludlow's wife, who had come out from
New York to spend five months with her relative.
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