It was all contained in what she had then almost immediately said to him; it was represented by the remark she had needed but ten minutes to make and that he hadn't been disposed to gainsay.

He could toddle alone, and the difference that showed was extraordinary.

The turn taken by their talk had promptly confirmed this difference; his larger confidence on the score of Mrs.Newsome did the rest; and the time seemed already far off when he had held out his small thirsty cup to the spout of her pail.

Her pail was scarce touched now, and other fountains had flowed for him; she fell into her place as but one of his tributaries; and there was a strange sweetness--a melancholy mildness that touched him--in her acceptance of the altered order.
It marked for himself the flight of time, or at any rate what he was pleased to think of with irony and pity as the rush of experience; it having been but the day before yesterday that he sat at her feet and held on by her garment and was fed by her hand.

It was the proportions that were changed, and the proportions were at all times, he philosophised, the very conditions of perception, the terms of thought.
It was as if, with her effective little entresol and and her wide acquaintance, her activities, varieties, promiscuities, the duties and devotions that took up nine tenths of her time and of which he got, guardedly, but the side-wind--it was as if she had shrunk to a secondary element and had consented to the shrinkage with the perfection of tact.