After the triumph that the bangle signified Elfrida felt
most satisfaction in what was constantly present to her
mind as her conquest of the Cardiffs. She measured its
importance by their value. Her admiration for Janet's
work in the beginning had been as sincere as her emulation
of its degree of excellence had been passionate, and
neither feeling had diminished with their intimacy. In
Lawrence Cardiff she felt vaguely the qualities that made
him a marked man among his fellows, his intellectual
breadth and keenness, his poise of brain, if one might
call it so, and the _habilete_ with which, without
permitting it to be part of his character, he sometimes
allowed himself to charm even people of whom he disapproved.
These things were indeterminately present to her, and
led her often to speculate as to how it was that Mr.
Cardiff's work expressed him so little. It seemed to her
that the one purpose of a personality like his was its
expression--otherwise one might as well be of the ruck.
"You write with your intellectual faculties," she said to
him once; "your soul is curiously dumb." But that was later.
The plane of Elfrida's relations with Janet altered
gradually, one might say, from the inclined, with Elfrida
on her knees at the lower end, to the horizontal.
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