“Zo,” he said gravely, “if you are now free, I will almost immediately come up; we shall not wait till eight o’clock.” Miriam bowed in response to the sweeping obeisance with which he turned into the dining-room, and ran upstairs. He came up before the end of the first course, before she had had time to test in the large overmantel the shape of her hair that had seemed in the little mirror upstairs, accidentally good, quite like the hair of someone who mysteriously knew how to get good effects.
“I have been sleeping,” he said in wide cheerful tones as he crossed the room, “all day until now. I am a little stupid; but I have very many things to say you. First I must say you,” he said more gravely and stood arrested with his coat tails in his hands, in front of the chair opposite to hers at a little table, “that your Emerson is most -wonderful.”
Miriam could not believe she had heard the deep-toned emphatic words. She stared stupidly at his unconscious thoughtful brow; for a strange moment feeling her own thoughts and her own outlook behind it. She felt an instant’s pang of disappointment; the fine brow had lost something, seemed familiar, almost homely. But an immense relief was surging through her. “No—Ree—ally, most-wonderful,” he reiterated with almost reproachful emphasis, sitting down with his head eagerly forward between his shoulders, waiting for her response. “Yes, isn’t he?” she said encouragingly and waited in a dream while he sat back and drew little volumes from his pocket, his white eyelids downcast below his frowning brow. Would he qualify his praise? Had he read enough to come upon any of the chills and contradictions? However this might be, Emerson had made upon this scholarly foreigner, groping in him with his scanty outfit of language, an overwhelming impression. Her own lonely overwhelming impression was justified. The eyes came up again, gravely earnest. “No,” he said, “I find it most difficult to express the profound impression this reading have made on me.”