There are degrees in habits? Then this was a habit of high degree. Whether it was a lover’s free-handed gift or the circumstance of a trial by ordeal, it was the best it could be, and Phoebe’s prettiness was equal to it. Indeed, she trended by choice to a fluffiness of dress and a cheapness in taste that Reuben, who was not fastidious, had not failed to note. You have seen, perhaps, a modern hospital nurse in uniform and the same nurse in mufti? That was the difference between Phoebe in her habit and Phoebe as he had seen her hitherto. More than ever, he felt conviction that no ill-judged passion was leading him astray, that here, when good dressmakers had clothed her, was his match and the match for the county. He tried to be skeptical, to criticize, and found, at the end of a scrutiny too frank to be well-mannered, that there was nothing here to criticize. She smiled, bravely, aware from her glass that what he saw was good, aware that he could not see how big a thing her horse appeared to her, how far above the ground the saddle was, how shrunken small she felt. But it was consoling to know that if she was going to break her neck, she was to do it in the finest clothes she had ever worn. His look of candid admiration was a tonic. “This is your horse,” he said. “We called him Hector.” She made Hector’s acquaintance prettily, but, plainly, she missed his point, and he made it more definitely. “Of course, you may rename him now that he is your own.” “Mine? My horse? But, Mr. Hepplestall--” “Have you your salts?” he asked, cutting short her cry of surprise. A horse more or less, he would have her think, was triviality when Reuben Hepplestall was in the mood to give. “Salts?” she repeated, puzzled. “In case you swoon,” he said gravely, and not ironically either. It was the swooning age. But not for Phoebe. Did ladies swoon at a first riding-lesson? She doubted it: they took that lesson young, as children, in the years before they were modish and swooning, and, in any case, it wasn’t her ladyhood that was in question now; it was her courage. “I shall not swoon,” she said, and he relished the bravado of it. Spirit? Aye, she had spirit to be wife of his, and it behoved him not to break it. If he had had thoughts, brutally, of making this test of her as harsh as he could, that was all altered now by the sight of her adorning the habit instead of overwhelmed by it, caressing Hector instead of shrinking from him, and he saw tenderness as the prime virtue of a riding-master. She wasn’t going to take a fall if he could prevent it.