For a while she had a grave misgiving. She felt that after all she had misjudged the man. She had never believed that he would be capable of anything like this within half an hour of her beginning to speak to him. She had never believed in sudden conversions--the _tours de force_ of the brilliant evangelist; and she had fancied that it would take her several days, extending over the whole summer, to convince that man that there was something in him. And yet there he was, profane--actually profane in his enthusiasm in less than half an hour!
And the worst of it was that she had been foolish enough to allow her action in this matter to suggest that she was staking her reputation as a prophetess upon the event. That was very foolish on her part. No sibil worthy of the name would have done this. The sibil made her book with wisdom and caution, a safe hedging and an ambiguous phrase being the note of her advice.
Priscilla felt that by laying so much emphasis upon the necessity for his throwing his whole soul into his game of tennis she had jeopardized the success of her counsel to him in the matters that mattered.
She felt angry with herself when this reflection came to her; but a few minutes later she felt far angrier at the thought that she had been angry over something that was no business of hers. What did it matter to her if Jack Wingfield made a fool of himself over his tennis or anything else or everything else? How could his success affect her one way or another?
She really could make no satisfactory reply to this question that suggested itself to her; for clever and all as she was, she was as imperfectly acquainted with her own character as most other women are of theirs. The eagerness with which she had carried out her scheme of adopting the _role_ of a retributory Providence in respect of Mr. Kelton had not given her a hint as to what was the dominant impulse of her nature; nor had her enthusiasm in regard to the working of her father's farm and the reform of the dairy revealed it to her; though she had been on the brink of a discovery of the truth when she had had her conversation with her friend Rosa going a-primrosing, and had said that if a man sometimes was the means of a girl's sudden development into a woman, she was equally sure that it was a woman who made a man of a man.