At Blithedale, no inclemency of sky or muddiness of earth
had ever impeded her daily walks. Here in town, she probably
preferred to tread the extent of the two drawing-rooms, and measure
out the miles by spaces of forty feet, rather than bedraggle her
skirts over the sloppy pavements. Accordingly, in about the time
requisite to pass through the arch of the sliding-doors to the front
window, and to return upon her steps, there she stood again, between
the festoons of the crimson curtains. But another personage was now
added to the scene. Behind Zenobia appeared that face which I had
first encountered in the wood-path; the man who had passed, side by
side with her, in such mysterious familiarity and estrangement,
beneath my vine curtained hermitage in the tall pine-tree. It was
Westervelt. And though he was looking closely over her shoulder, it
still seemed to me, as on the former occasion, that Zenobia repelled
him,--that, perchance, they mutually repelled each other, by some
incompatibility of their spheres.
This impression, however, might have been altogether the result of
fancy and prejudice in me. The distance was so great as to
obliterate any play of feature by which I might otherwise have been
made a partaker of their counsels.
There now needed only Hollingsworth and old Moodie to complete the
knot of characters, whom a real intricacy of events, greatly assisted
by my method of insulating them from other relations, had kept so
long upon my mental stage, as actors in a drama.
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