This future, its figures just about to emerge from the wings into full view, slightly troubled his reverie. It was at dawn that his mind again turned to it with a conjecture half amused and half reluctant. There was something disturbing in the linkage he must make between that child’s face on the mist and the Miss Gifford he was so soon to see. That she would, at all events in her own conception, dominate the stage, he felt sure; she might even expect a special attention from a spectator whose memory could join hers in that far first act. He was pretty sure that his memory would have to do service for both; and quite sure that memory would not hold for her, as it did for him, a distinct tincture of pain, of restlessness, as though there strove in it something shackled and unfulfilled.
One’s thoughts, at four o’clock in the morning, after hours of sleeplessness, became fantastic, and Gavan found himself watching, with some shrinking, this image of the past, suddenly released, brought gasping and half stupefied to the air, to freedom, to new, strong activity, after having been, for so long, bound and gagged and thrust into an underground prison.
He turned to a forecast of what Eppie would probably be like. He had heard a good deal about her, and he had not cared for what he had heard. The fact that one did hear a good deal was not pleasing. Every one, in describing her, used the word charming; he had gathered that it meant, as applied to her, more than mere prettiness, wit, or social deftness; and it was precisely for the more that it meant that he did not care.
Apparently what really distinguished her was her energy. She traveled with her cousin, Lady Alicia Waring, a worldly, kindly dabbler in art and politics; she rushed from country-house to country-house; she worked in the slums; she sat on committees; she canvassed for parliamentary friends; she hunted, she yachted, she sang, she broke hearts, and, by all accounts, had high and resolute matrimonial ambitions. Would Eppie Gifford “get” So-and-so was a question that Gavan had heard more than once repeated, with the graceless terseness of our modern colloquialism, and it spoke much for Eppie’s popularity that it was usually asked in sympathy.