It was at this point in the conversation that Miss Thriplow became aware that she had made a huge mistake, that she was sailing altogether on the wrong tack. Another moment and she would have consummated a hideous error in social judgment, have irreparably made what she called in her jovial undergraduatish moments a “floater.” Miss Thriplow was very sensitive about her floaters. Memories of floaters had a way of sticking deep in her spirit, making wounds that never thoroughly healed. Cicatrised, the old scars still hurt from time to time. Suddenly, for no reason, in the middle of the night, or even in the middle of the jolliest party, she would remember an ancient floater—just like that, _à propos de bottes_—would remember and be overcome by a feeling of self-reproach and retrospective shame. And there was no remedy, no spiritual prophylaxis. One might do one’s best to invent triumphantly right and tactful alternatives to the floater—imagine oneself, for example, whispering to sister Fanny the mollifying instead of the bitter, wounding phrase; might walk in fancy with the airiest dignity out of Bardolph’s studio into the dirty little street, past the house with the canary hanging in the window (an exquisite touch the canary), away, away—when in fact (oh, Lord, what a fool one had been, and how miserable, afterwards!), in actual fact one had stayed. One could do one’s best; but one could never really persuade oneself that the floater hadn’t happened. Imagination might struggle to annihilate the odious memory; but it never had power to win a decisive victory. And now, if she wasn’t careful, she’d have another floater rankling and suppurating in her memory. “How could I have been so stupid?” she thought, “how could I?” For it was obvious now that the dashing manner, the fashionable disguise were entirely inappropriate to the occasion. Calamy, it was clear, didn’t appreciate that sort of thing at all; he might have once, but he didn’t now. If she went on like this she’d have him putting her down as merely frivolous, worldly, a snob; and it would need time and enormous efforts to obliterate the disastrous first impression. Surreptitiously Miss Thriplow slipped the opal ring from off the little finger of her right hand, held it for a moment, clenched out of sight in her left; then, when Calamy wasn’t looking, pushed it down into the crevice between the padded seat and the back of her chintz-covered arm-chair.