A triumph that! Howbeit, when she went to bed that night there was a
persistent pain of dry unhappiness in her heart, and a self-contemptuous
feeling, which she tried to get the better of by calling it ennui. But
in time a kind of hardness, at once flexible and impenetrable, began to
encase her, rendering her course more easy, less liable to
embarrassment, more self-confident than before.
At length a crisis was brought on by the attempt of the boldest of her
admirers to kiss her. She repelled him passionately, facing him with
gleaming eyes, and lips white with anger and disgust. He was surprised,
at first--then angry; but she spoke to him in a way that cowed, and
finally almost made him ashamed of himself. He even went so far,
afterward, as to try to knock a fellow down for speaking disrespectfully
of "Neelie." For her own part, she locked herself into her room, and
cried tempestuously for half an hour; then she spent a still longer time
in lying with her heated face upon the pillow, reviewing the incidents
of her life since Bressant had entered into it. He was the superior of
any man she had met before or since: she was sure of it now; it could no
longer be called the infatuation of inexperience. She took herself well
to task for the recent laxity and imprudence of her conduct; did not
spare to cut where the flesh was tender; and resolved never again to lay
herself open to blame.
This was very well, but the mood was too strained and exalted to be
depended upon. Cornelia got up from the disordered bed, put it to rights
again, washed her stained face carefully, rearranged her hair, and went
down-stairs. All that afternoon she was cold, grave, and reserved;
inquiries after her health met with a chilling answer, and her friends
wisely concluded to leave her malady, whatever it were, to the cure of
time. As dinner progressed, Cornelia began to thaw: when Mr. Grumblow,
the member of Congress, requested her, with solemn and oppressive
courtesy, to do him the honor of taking a glass of wine with him, she
responded graciously; and as the toasts circulated, she first looked
upon her ideal resolves with good-humored tolerance, and then they
escaped her memory altogether. She became once more lively and
sparkling, and carried on what she imagined was a very brilliant
conversation with two or three people at once. By the time she was
ready to retire, she had practised anew the whole list of her
lately-abrogated accomplishments; and she wound up by picking the French
novel out of the corner into which she had disdainfully thrown it twelve
hours before, reading it in bed until she fell asleep, and dreaming that
she was its heroine. And yet she had not forgotten to wind up Bressant's
watch, and put it in its usual place under her pillow.