The gentleman went on, passing from her forward vision as he
replaced his hat. Of himself he was nothing to Alice, except for
the gracious circumstance that he had shown strong consciousness
of a pretty girl. He was middle-aged, substantial, a family man,
securely married; and Alice had with him one of those long
acquaintances that never become emphasized by so much as five
minutes of talk; yet for this inconsequent meeting she had
enacted a little part like a fragment in a pantomime of Spanish
wooing.
It was not for him--not even to impress him, except as a
messenger. Alice was herself almost unaware of her thought,
which was one of the running thousands of her thoughts that took
no deliberate form in words. Nevertheless, she had it, and it
was the impulse of all her pretty bits of pantomime when she met
other acquaintances who made their appreciation visible, as this
substantial gentleman did. In Alice's unworded thought, he was
to be thus encouraged as in some measure a champion to speak well
of her to the world; but more than this: he was to tell some
magnificent unknown bachelor how wonderful, how mysterious, she
was.
She hastened on gravely, a little stirred reciprocally with the
supposed stirrings in the breast of that shadowy ducal mate, who
must be somewhere "waiting," or perhaps already seeking her; for
she more often thought of herself as "waiting" while he sought
her; and sometimes this view of things became so definite that it
shaped into a murmur on her lips.
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