To herself she explained this on the theory that she needed something to occupy her mind.  Something else she really meant, for Mr. Harrington Surtaine was now occupying it to an inexcusable extent.  She wished very much to see Harrington Surtaine, and, for the first time in her life, she feared what she wished.  What she had so loftily announced to Kathleen Pierce as her unalterable determination toward the editor of the “Clarion” wasn’t as easy to perform as to promise.  Yet, the explanation of the partial error, into which the self-excusatory Miss Pierce had led her, was certainly due him, according to her notions of fair play.  If she sent for him to come, he would, she shrewdly judged, decline.  The alternative was to beard him in his office.  In the strengthening and self-revealing solitude of her garden, this glowing summer day, Esme sat trying to make up her mind.  A daring brown thrasher, his wings a fair match for the ruddy-golden glow in the girl’s eyes, hopped into her haunt, and twittered his counsel of courage.

“I’ll do it NOW,” said Esme, and the bird, with a triumphant chirp of congratulation, swooped off to tell the news to the world of wings and flowers.

To the consequent interview there was no witness.  So it may best be chronicled in the report made by the interviewer to her friend Mrs. Festus Willard, who, in the cool seclusion of her sewing-room, was overwhelmed by a rush of Esme to the heart, as she put it.  Not having been apprised of Miss Elliot’s conflicting emotions since her departure, Mrs. Willard’s mind was as a page blank for impressions when her visitor burst in upon her, pirouetted around the room, appropriated the softest corner of the divan, and announced spiritedly: 

“You needn’t ask me where I’ve been, for I won’t tell you; or what I’ve been doing, for it’s my own affair; anyway, you wouldn’t be interested.  And if you insist on knowing, I’ve been revisiting the pale glimpses of the moon—­at three o’clock P.M.”

“What do you mean, moon?” inquired Mrs. Willard, unconsciously falling into a pit of slang.

“The moon we all cry for and don’t get.  In this case a haughty young editor.”

“You’ve been to see Hal Surtaine,” deduced Mrs. Willard.

“You have guessed it—­with considerable aid and assistance.”

“What for?”

“On a matter of journalistic import,” said Miss Elliot solemnly.

“But you don’t cry for Hal Surtaine,” objected her friend, reverting to the lunar metaphor.

“Don’t I?  I’d have cried—­I’d have burst into a perfect storm of tears—­for him—­or you—­or anybody who so much as pointed a finger at me, I was so scared.”

“Scared?  You!  I don’t believe it.”

“I don’t believe it myself—­now,” confessed Esme, candidly.  “But it felt most extremely like it at the time.”

“You know I don’t at all approve of—­”

“Of me.  I know you don’t, Jinny.  Neither does he.”