On which extravagant dazzle of pleasantries she paused a moment, Ralph feeling the while that their being to such a tune mutually and, as he might have put it, crudely astare signified something that had not as yet come up between them. Oh they had been making and taking a prodigious amount of affectionate assurance, but didn't Ralph know on the spot, hadn't he in fact been advised for the last three minutes, that here was matter of intimacy beyond any token they had exchanged and a different sort of business altogether from even the sharpest need yet resting on him to patch up a sense? There had been none he didn't patch up with that effect as of a quick bright triumph over difficulty--so that we have repeatedly seen how the challenge to his awareness, when pressed, set that awareness on its feet in time, never failing after this fashion to save his confidence. What had now taken place was that unexpectedly his need seemed to betray instead of helping him: every blest reference save the present had in other words found him ready--and not just ready to show he knew, but ready quite to know; only this question of an identity thrust at him to which he couldn't rise and which didn't, like all the others, breathe on him after an instant the secret of the means of rising, only this one left him to direct at Molly (which came indeed to saying at their companions too) a smile which would turn really to sickness should it have to last but a moment longer. Stranger than anything yet for our young man was what now occurred: his getting as in the glimmer of a flash the measure of the wonders he had achieved, and getting it through this chill of the facility stayed. What made it a chill was the felt danger, drawn from her look, of Molly's speaking his case out at him before he could prevent her. "Why you don't know, truly you don't know, therefore what are you talking about?"--that was in her face or was on the point of being, and the great pang was that he minded it himself still more than she and the others certainly would if they should fairly detect it. He _didn't_ know, he hadn't known, and he wasn't going to or it would have come by this time: there wasn't in him the first faint possibility of an "Oh yes, your sister Nan of course, who is of such-and-such an age and such-and-such a figure and such-and-such a connection with the grand image of you that we've had at home!" There was no grand image, nor even any scantest, of a nice little body, as Molly had put it, lurking in the family background and as to whom, by the same magic of wanting to enough which had constantly served him, he could be sure he was passably provided. The possibility of sickness was in the fall from such a proved independence of the baseness, as who should say, of pretending. Two or three times, yes, it might have appeared he should have to pretend, some gap in his inspiration remaining too distinctly unbridged; but with that