She had never been more splendid, it may at once be said, than in the light of the reception she gave him on the morrow of these events: she fed with so free a hand his fancy--all uninstructed as he ruefully confessed it--of her resemblance to some great portrait of the Renaissance. That was the analogy he had, at favouring times, in the approaches to Park Avenue, or perhaps still more in the retreats from it, fondly and consistently found for her: she was an Italian princess of the _cinque-cento_, and Titian or the grand Veronese might, as the phrase was, have signed her image. She had a wondrous old-time bloom and an air of noble security. The roots of her flowering were watered by Wall Street, where old Mr. Coyne and her maternal grandsire, both still in the field and almost equally proud of her, conspired to direct the golden stream; though the plant itself seemed to spring from a soil in which upheavals--when upheavals occurred--offered to panic at least a deeper ground than a fall in stocks. Large calm beauty, low square dresses, crude and multiplied jewels, the habit of watching strife from a height and yet of looking at danger with a practised bravery, were some of the impressions that consorted with her presence. When therefore she had, with whatever kindness, shaken her slow head at Ralph three times, there came to him a sad sense of his having staked his cast, after all, but on the sensibility of a painted picture. She had touched him at other times with a high hardness, whereas at present, clearly, she would have given anything to seem mild; only it was at the end of ten minutes of such mildness as if he stood under her closed window in darkness and sleet. This brought the truth home to him as it had not yet come: he had nothing in common with her apprehension--so particular, so private as that would be--of the kind of personal force, of action on her nerves and her senses, that might win from her a second surrender. Strange he had always thought it that her first had been, against all the likelihoods, Townsend Coyne, so queer though so clever, so damaged, to the extent even of considerably looking it, yet somehow so little touching in proportion, and so suggestive of experience, or at least of overstrained and ambiguous knowledges, by the large expense of it all, as who should say, rather than by equivalents accruing in the way of wisdom or grace. Ralph reflected as to this, at the same time, that in the case of a relation of that intimacy, really of that obscurity, nothing was appreciable from outside; this was the commonest wisdom of life--little indeed as it governed the general pretence of observation that no one but the given man and the given woman could possibly know the truth, or indeed any of the conditions, of the state of their being so closely bound. It didn't matter now therefore that the conditions of the Coynes had put him a question impossible to answer; the answer was Aurora's own, for whatever future application, whatever determination of her further conduct: she had been admirable and inscrutable--that was the only clearness; though indeed with it one might at a stretch inwardly remark that if the future _did_ owe her amends she probably saw them as numerous.