plucked hold of him by two favorite points of vantage, and threw him
bodily into the water. This movement, as it chanced, turned his gaze
seaward. The youth was seen to stand an instant, rigid as a bather in
marble, staring out over the water he had traversed ...
Then he turned, heedless of the brandishings of the little man behind
him, and went away toward his bath-house in the manner that is best
described as a slink.
III
How Carlisle screamed, when the Boat upset, or else didn't,
as the Case might be; also of Mrs. Heth, who went down Six
Floors to nail Falsehoods, etc.
Miss Carlisle Heth sat cold and proud in the approaching lifeboat,
picking at her sopping skirts. She ignored, hardly hearing, the
conversation of her rescuer, hinting broadly that she should reveal
these mysteries to him. Revelation, as she understood herself, was the
contrary of her desire. The occurrences of the last quarter of an hour
had actually dazed her; but the net result of them was sufficiently
manifest. Her purpose had been to detach herself unnoticed from
Dalhousie's gay fame. And now:--_Look at the boat pavilion_....
It was the bitterest moment of Miss Heth's well-sheltered young life. Of
notoriety, of a vulgar sensation such as this, of malicious gossip, of
all that was cheap and familiarizing, she had a deep-seated horror. Of
the moment of reckoning with her mother, whose objections to noisy rumor
rather surpassed her own, she felt a wholesome dread. There was also the
matter of her personal appearance, which she conceived to be repulsive:
she was confident that she looked a hideosity and a sight. Her eyes
fastened from afar upon the staring faces on the pavilion. She saw
hungry curiosity stalking there, naked and unashamed, and the sight
sickened her.
For these faces, as individual faces, she felt indifference and
contempt. But in the mass they seemed to assume the enormous importance
of good or ill repute. What these people were saying of her and
Dalhousie to-day, the world would say to-morrow.
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