“Wasn’t it perfectly elegant!” exclaimed the up-country bride.  And upon my assenting, she made a further declaration to David:  “It’s just aivry bit as good as the Isle of Champagne.”

This I discovered to be a comic opera, mounted with spendthrift brilliance, which David had taken her to see at the town of Gonzales, just before they were married.

As we made our way down the bending river she continued to make many observations to me in that up-country accent of hers, which is a fashion of speech that may be said to differ as widely from the speech of the low-country as cotton differs from rice.  I began to fear that, in spite of my truly good intentions, I was again failing to be as “attentive” as the occasion demanded; and so I presented her with my floral tribute.

She was immediately arch.  “I’d surely be depriving somebody!” and on this I got to the full her limpid look.

I assured her that this would not be so, and pointed to the other flowers I had.

Accordingly, after a little more archness, she took them, as she had, of course, fully meant to do from the first; she also took a woman’s revenge.  “I’ll not be any more lonesome going down than I was coming up,” she said.  “David’s enough.”  And this led me definitely to conclude that David had secured a helpmate who could take care of herself, in spite of the limpidity of her eyes.

A steel wasp?  Again that misleading description of Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael’s, to which, since my early days in Kings Port, my imagination may be said to have been harnessed, came back into my mind.  I turned its injustice over and over beneath the light which the total Hortense now shed upon it—­or rather, not the total Hortense, but my whole impression of her, as far as I had got; I got a good deal further before we had finished.  To the slow, soft accompaniment of these gliding river shores, where all the shadows had changed since morning, so that new loveliness stood revealed at every turn, my thoughts dwelt upon this perfected specimen of the latest American moment—­so late that she contained nothing of the past, and a great deal of to-morrow.  I basked myself in the memory of her achieved beauty, her achieved dress, her achieved insolence, her luxurious complexity.  She was even later than those quite late athletic girls, the Amazons of the links, whose big, hard football faces stare at one from public windows and from public punts, whose giant, manly strides take them over leagues of country and square miles of dance-floor, and whose bursting, blatant, immodest health glares upon sea-beaches and round supper tables.  Hortense knew that even now the hour of such is striking, and that the American boy will presently turn with relief to a creature who will more clearly remind him that he is a man and that she is a woman.