The dream of acquisition at Weatherend would
have had to be wild indeed, and John Marcher found himself, among
such suggestions, disconcerted almost equally by the presence of
those who knew too much and by that of those who knew nothing. The
great rooms caused so much poetry and history to press upon him
that he needed some straying apart to feel in a proper relation
with them, though this impulse was not, as happened, like the
gloating of some of his companions, to be compared to the movements
of a dog sniffing a cupboard. It had an issue promptly enough in a
direction that was not to have been calculated.
It led, briefly, in the course of the October afternoon, to his
closer meeting with May Bartram, whose face, a reminder, yet not
quite a remembrance, as they sat much separated at a very long
table, had begun merely by troubling him rather pleasantly. It
affected him as the sequel of something of which he had lost the
beginning. He knew it, and for the time quite welcomed it, as a
continuation, but didn't know what it continued, which was an
interest or an amusement the greater as he was also somehow aware--
yet without a direct sign from her--that the young woman herself
hadn't lost the thread.
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