" Invite him to dinner to-day? It made her shiver to
think of it.
And so her afternoon was one long fret. Broken at intervals. Three
times she had to go down stairs on errands--that is, she thought she had
to go down stairs on errands. Thus, going and coming, she had six
glimpses of him, in the aggregate, without seeming to look in his
direction; and she tried to endure these electric ecstasies without
showing any sign, but they fluttered her up a good deal, and she felt
that the naturalness she was putting on was overdone and quite too
frantically sober and hysterically calm to deceive.
The painter had his share of the rapture; he had his six glimpses, and
they smote him with waves of pleasure that assaulted him, beat upon him,
washed over him deliciously, and drowned out all consciousness of what he
was doing with his brush. So there were six places in his canvas which
had to be done over again.
At last Gwendolen got some peace of mind by sending word to the
Thompsons, in the neighborhood, that she was coming there to dinner.
She wouldn't be reminded, at that table, that there was an absentee who
ought to be a presentee--a word which she meant to look out in the
dictionary at a calmer time.
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