Mr. Kinney, therefore, sat beside her, gallantly steadying
her heavy sketching-umbrella against the wind.
Mr. Withers, while awaiting the return of his own team from the ferry, had
accepted a seat in Thane's wagon. (It was a bag containing a curling-iron,
lamp, and other implements appertaining to "wimples and crisping-pins,"
that Daphne had forgotten, but she had not described its contents. One bag
is as innocent as another, on the outside; it might have held her Prayer
Book.)
Thane was metaphorically "kicking himself" because time was passing and
he could not find words delicate enough in which to clothe an indelicate
request,--one outrageous in its present connection, yet from some points of
view, definitively his own, a most urgent and natural one.
"For one shall grasp, and one resign,
And God shall make the balance good."
To grasp is a simple act enough; but to do so delicately, reverently,
without forcing one's preferences on those of another, may not always be so
simple. Thane was not a Goth nor a Vandal; by choice he would have sought
to preserve the amenities of life; but a meek man he was not, and the thing
he now desired was, he considered, well worth the sacrifice of such small
pretensions as his in the direction of unselfishness.
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