His looks and speech unconsciously discouraged it, so that if Cecilia
had been at all that way inclined, she must long ago have been healed.
Fortunately, she never had been, having too much distrust of her own
feelings to give way to them completely. And Thyme, that healthy product
of them both, at once younger for her age, and older, than they had
ever been, with her incapacity for nonsense, her love for open air and
facts--that fresh, rising plant, so elastic and so sane--she had never
given them a single moment of uneasiness.
Stephen, close to his hat-rack, felt soreness in his heart. Such blows
as Fortune had dealt, and meant to deal him, he had borne, and he could
bear, so long as there was nothing in his own manner, or in that of
others, to show him they were blows.
Hurriedly depositing his hat, he ran to Cecilia. He still preserved the
habit of knocking on her door before he entered, though she had never,
so far, answered, "Don't come in!" because she knew his knock. The
custom gave, in fact, the measure of his idealism. What he feared, or
what he thought he feared, after nineteen years of unchecked entrance,
could never have been ascertained; but there it was, that flower of
something formal and precise, of something reticent, within his soul.
This time, for once, he did not knock, and found Cecilia hooking up her
tea-gown and looking very sweet.
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