Her struggle was to keep life fixed and constant, and all about her she found life fluent and changing. Or perhaps life was constant, and the fluency was in her. Or perhaps the difficulty was all in this man, about whom she had never been able to take any position that he did not shortly oust her from it. Considering her resolution only last night, she too had thought, when she began, that she was carrying generosity to the point of downright disloyalty to papa. By what strangeness of his expression did he make her feel that even this was not generous enough, that more was required of the daughter of the Works than merely withdrawing from all responsibility?... V. Vivian regarded the lovely Hun. As a prophet you might glory, but as a man you must face the music.... "But I must tell you," he began, with visible effort, "that you--you will feel very differently, when you've seen--" However, she interrupted him, raising her eyes with a little smile, sweet and somewhat sad. "I'll look after my part of it," said she; and there was her pledge of amity held out, gloved in white. "Do you think you can be my friend?" The light showed another change in the young man's face. He took the hand, and said with sudden strange feeling: "Let my life prove it." So Cally turned away thinking that she had found that rarest thing among men, a friend of women. And Mr. V.V. walked off blindly up the lamplit street, his heart a singing and a pain. XXVII Of one of the Triumphs of Cally's Life, and the Tête-à-tête following, which vaguely depresses her; of the Little Work-Girl who brought the Note that Sunday, oddly remet at Gentlemen's Furnishings. Canning was absent more than two weeks. His attorney's business had brought entanglements before and behind; he was by no means a free man even now. Not all the powers of government could have detained him, we may be sure, had he considered such detention hurtful to the dearest matter in the world. But Canning, in the peculiar circumstances, had concluded that a period of meditation was well, that absence made the heart grow fonder; and, if human calculations are worth anything at all, his conclusions were amply justified. Through the days of their separation his chosen had constantly felt upon her the weight of that vast intangible pressure which pins each mortal of us, except the strong, to his own predestined groove. Chiefly mamma, but many other things, too, had been pressing Cally steadily from thoughts of useful deeds, of which she knew so little, toward thoughts of Mrs. Hugo Canning, of which she knew so much. For sixteen days, time and circumstance had played straight into her lover's hands....