George returned, and made an early appearance at Potlurg. Dawtie met him in the court. She did not know him, but involuntarily shrunk from him. He frowned. There was a natural repugnance¹ between them; the one was simple, the other double; the one was pure, the other selfish; the one loved her neighbor, the other preyed² upon his.

 

George was a little louder, and his manners were more studied. Alexa felt him overblown. He was floridly at his ease. What little “atmosphere” there had been about him was gone, and its place taken by a colored fog. His dress was unobjectionable, and yet attracted notice; perhaps it was only too considered. Alexa was disappointed, and a little relieved. He looked older, yet not more manly—and rather fat. He had more of the confidence women dislike to see a man without, than was quite pleasant even to the confident Alexa. His speech was not a little infected with the nasality—as easy to catch as hard to get rid of—which I presume the Puritans carried from England to America. On the whole, George was less interesting than Alexa had expected.

 

He came to her as if he would embrace her, but an instinctive³ movement on her part sufficed to check him. She threw an additional heartiness⁴ into her welcome, and kept him at arm's-length. She felt as if she had lost an old friend, and not gained a new one. He made himself very agreeable, but that he made himself so, made him less so.

 

There was more than these changes at work in her; there was still the underlying⁵ doubt concerning him. Although not yet a live soul, she had strong if vague ideas about right and wrong; and although she sought many things a good deal more than righteousness, I do not see what temptation would at once have turned her from its known paths. At the same time I do not see what she had yet, more than hundreds of thousands of well-meaning women, to secure her from slow decay and final ruin.

 

They laughed and talked together very like the way they used, but “every like is not the same,” and they knew there was a difference. George was stung by the sense of it—too much to show that he was

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