After an interval, during which she sat with a glitter in her eye, she
added explosively:

"_I'll_ show her whether I'm probable!"

The remark, it seemed, had rankled even in the moment of supreme
victory....

Spring, too, it became, the quintessence of spring, in the young
maiden's heart. Nature but symbolized the brilliant new life
henceforward to be her own. And the more she came to discern her lover
against his background of wealth, place, and power, the more she saw how
brilliant that life was to be, the more she thrilled with the magnitude
of her own accomplishment. Of himself in their new relation, Canning
talked much in these days, and with an unaffected earnestness: of the
high nature of the career they would make together; of his own honors
and large responsibilities to come; in chief of his family, whose name
it would be their pride to uphold through the years ahead. And the
girl's heart warmed as she listened. What was all the storied dignity of
the Cannings now but so much sweet myrrh and frankincense upon her own
girlish altar?...

He was her maiden's ideal. He was her prince from a story-book, come
true. If any flaw were conceivable in so complete a fulfilment, it might
have been imagined only in this very fact of Hugo's all-perfectness.
Marrying upward, in the nature of the case, involved a large material
one-sidedness: that was the object and the glory of it all. Yet now, in
her romantic situation, there woke new emotions in Cally Heth, and she
dimly perceived that her lifelong ambition carried, through its very
advantages, a subtle disadvantage to the heart. Unsuspected tendernesses