She slipped out while he was still talking, and went home strangely moved.
As to the festivities, she did her best to join in them.

The sensitive soul often reproached itself afterward for having juggled in the matter.
Was it not her duty to manage a little society and gayety for her sisters sometimes?
Her mother could not undertake it, and was always plaintively protesting that Catherine would not be young.

So for a short week or two Catherine did her best to be young and climbed the mountain grass, or forded the mountain streams with the energy and the grace of perfect health, trembling afterward at night as she knelt by her window to think how much sheer pleasure the day had contained.

Her life had always had the tension of a bent bow.

It seemed to her once or twice during this fortnight as though something were suddenly relaxed in her, and she felt a swift Bunyan-like terror of backsliding, of falling away.
But she never confessed herself fully; she was even blind to what her perspicacity would have seen so readily in another's case--the little arts and maneuvers of those about her.