He put that question, but neither abating nor enlarging his distance; it was one of the moments of his holding them under the spell of his growing brilliancy, as he might for all the world have imagined--too much under it to move an eyelid for the time, and yet also with the betrayed impulse to exchange a wink, vulgarly so to call it, between themselves; the very impulse, all of sharpened comfort surely, to show each other _where_ they felt together, which he had already more than once caught in the act of profiting by its quick opportunity. Not their impulse, however, and not any play of comment that should attest his success with them, was most matter for thought with him now; but exactly his himself so wishing to cry out that he was pleased, to say again and yet again that he liked what was before him, so that there might be no mistake about it for his own nerves. His nerves, happily and helpfully active from the first, had been in just that proportion a pleasure to themselves--so that up to the moment of his first hearing of sweet Nan, whom he was now so oddly unable to figure save as very peculiarly one with this term of allusion to her, which might _all_ have been, as they said in Boston, her "given" name, up to that moment his sail had done nothing but swell in the breeze. Why the mere hint of _more_ sweetness still than the already looked for and the already grasped should have suddenly caused the breeze to drop and the sail to indulge in its first, its single flap, was not so much his concern as to arrest the possibility of any like further little waste of force. It was glorious so to vibrate, but to do it you needed your force--in fact all there was of it; so that to spend even one throb of it on any mystery of a particular muffled point or fact was at the best a loose form of contribution. So played the instinct to make surer still what was sure; yes, such a truth, for instance, as the perfect practicability of Perry even, once he should be _really_ reduced to matter of splendid sport. For didn't it _all_ keep becoming again splendid sport?--that is if he left out the question of sweet Nan, which seemed something different and possibly either of a lower sort of interest or of none at all; unless indeed possibly of a yet greater.