He was at once simpler and more
deferential than any one she had known; and sometimes it was just when
he was simplest that she most felt the distance between them. Education
and opportunity had divided them by a width that no effort of hers could
bridge, and even when his youth and his admiration brought him nearest,
some chance word, some unconscious allusion, seemed to thrust her back
across the gulf.
Never had it yawned so wide as when she fled up to her room carrying
with her the echo of Mr. Royall's tale. Her first confused thought
was the prayer that she might never see young Harney again. It was
too bitter to picture him as the detached impartial listener to such
a story. "I wish he'd go away: I wish he'd go tomorrow, and never come
back!" she moaned to her pillow; and far into the night she lay there,
in the disordered dress she had forgotten to take off, her whole soul
a tossing misery on which her hopes and dreams spun about like drowning
straws.
Of all this tumult only a vague heart-soreness was left when she opened
her eyes the next morning.
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