It may be remembered, too, that there was
in the very tenderness of her contemplation of the priest in her path an
imperious tinge born of the way men had so invariably melted there.
Certainly they had been men and not priests; but the little flickering
doubt that sometimes leaped from this source through the glow of her
imagination she quenched very easily with the reflection that such a
superficies was after all a sophistry, and that only its rudiments were
facts. She proposed, calmly and lovingly, to deal with the facts.
She told herself that she would not be greedy about the conditions under
which she should prevail; but her world had always, always shaped itself
answering her hand, and if she cast her eyes upon the ground now, and
left the future, even to-morrow, undevisaged, it was because she would
not find any concessions among its features if she could help it. It was
a trick she played upon her own consciousness; she would not look; but
she could see without looking. She saw that which explained itself to be
best, fittest, most reasonable, and thus she sometimes wandered with
Arnold anticipatively, on afternoons when there was no matinee, through
the perfumed orange orchards of Los Angeles, on the Pacific slope.
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