Explore "The Miller of Old Church" by Ellen Glasgow on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
She was enchantingly pretty, there was no doubt of that, thought Gay as he watched her at dinner. He had rarely seen a face so radiant in expression, and she had lost, he noticed, the touch of provincialism in her voice and manner. To-night, for the first time, he felt that there was a fawn-like shyness about her, as if her soul had flown startled before his approach. Of her meeting with Abel in Applegate he knew nothing, and while he discerned instinctively the softness and the richness of her mood, it was but reasonable that he should attribute it to a different and, as it happened, to a mistaken cause. He liked that faint shadow of her lashes on her vivid cheeks, and while he drank his coffee and cracked his nuts, he told himself, half humorously, that the ideal love, after all, was a perpetual virgin in perpetual flight. As he rose from the table, he remembered Blossom, and the pile of her half-read letters in his travelling bag.
"She's a dear good girl, and just because I've got myself into a mess, I've no idea of behaving like a cad to her," he thought.