"Dear Miss Craydocke!" cried the girl; "if I thought it would seem like
that, I would send and tip them all into the river. But you,--you
_can't_ be eclipsed! Your orbit runs too high above ours."
Sin Saxon's brightness and independence, that lapsed so easily
into sauciness, and made it so hard for her to observe the mere
conventionalisms of respect, in no way hindered the real reverence that
grew in her toward the superiority she recognized, and that now softened
her tone to a tenderness of humility before her friend.
There was a grace upon her in these days that all saw. Over her real wit
and native vivacity, it was like a porcelain shade about a flame. One
could look at it, and be glad of it, without winking. The brightness was
all there, but there was a difference in the giving forth. What had been
a bit self-centred and self-conscious--bright as if only for being
bright and for dazzling--was outgoing and self-forgetful, and so
softened. Leslie Goldthwaite read by it a new answer to some of her old
questions. "What harm is there in it?" she had asked herself on their
first meeting, when Sin Saxon's overflow of merry mischief, that yet did
"no special or obvious good," made her so taking, so the centre of
whatever group into which she came.
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