“From the beginning, she had sat looking at him fixedly. As he now
leaned back in his chair, and bent his deep-set eyes upon her in his turn,
perhaps he might have seen one wavering moment in her, when she was impelled to
throw herself upon his breast, and give him the pent-up confidences of her
heart. But, to see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial
barriers he had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those
subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra
until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The
barriers were too many and too high for such a leap. With his unbending,
utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot
away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost
opportunities that are drowned there.” (99)
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