She sent up an interjection on the misfortune of her not having been born a man.

It was to him the one smart of sourness in her charm as a woman.

Among the boulder-stones of the ascent to the path, he ventured to propose a little masculine assistance in a hand stretched mutely.  Although there was no great need for help, her natural kindliness checked the inclination to refuse it.  When their hands disjoined she found herself reddening.  She cast it on the exertion.  Her heart was throbbing.  It might be the exertion likewise.

He walked and talked much more airily along the descending pathway, as if he had suddenly become more intimately acquainted with her.

She listened, trying to think of the manner in which he might be taught to serve that cause she had at heart; and the colour deepened on her cheeks till it set fire to her underlying consciousness:  blood to spirit.  A tremour of alarm ran through her.

His request for one of the crocuses to keep as a souvenir of the morning was refused.  ’They are sacred; they were all devoted to my friend when I plucked them.’

He pointed to a half-open one, with the petals in disparting pointing to junction, and compared it to the famous tiptoe ballet-posture, arms above head and fingers like swallows meeting in air, of an operatic danseuse of the time.

‘I do not see it, because I will not see it,’ she said, and she found a personal cooling and consolement in the phrase.—­We have this power of resisting invasion of the poetic by the commonplace, the spirit by the blood, if we please, though you men may not think that we have!  Her alarmed sensibilities bristled and made head against him as an enemy.  She fancied (for the aforesaid reason—­because she chose) that it was on account of the offence to her shy morning pleasure by his Londonizing.  At any other moment her natural liveliness and trained social ease would have taken any remark on the eddies of the tide of converse; and so she told herself, and did not the less feel wounded, adverse, armed.  He seemed somehow—­to have dealt a mortal blow to the happy girl she had become again.  The woman she was protested on behalf of the girl, while the girl in her heart bent lowered sad eyelids to the woman; and which of them was wiser of the truth she could not have said, for she was honestly not aware of the truth, but she knew she was divided in halves, with one half pitying the other, one rebuking:  and all because of the incongruous comparison of a wild flower to an opera dancer!  Absurd indeed.  We human creatures are the silliest on earth, most certainly.