We hasten to concede of course that Ralph entered in those few instants but into imperfect possession of the excited sense, the glimpse of more and more great things, provoked for him by his elder kinswoman's resonant arrival; yet it's no extravagance to say that the knowledge Molly had been teaching him he was already master of took a measureless bound with the act of his just kissing Mrs. Midmore's hand. She let him do this as a first sequel to her remark on her daughter's description of their commerce, but his own next consciousness was that of being kissed by her on both cheeks--he could scarce have said whether more freely or more nobly: the first sequel would have been poor without the second, she struck him as having at once admonished him, leaving on his hands his quick conception of how he should act with true elegance, the style of behaviour on which she would generally speaking most reckon. He had never before kissed a lady's hand, nor seen one kissed, save in a stage-play; also the way he did it would stamp him the barbarian she had disposed him, under the rush of his perceptions, to seek his best safety in proving himself: yet it was to become at the end of a minute a consequence of these things that he felt to the full how soundly Molly had answered for his freedom to fear nothing. This he so succeeded in achieving by the aid of the ladies conjoined that he could scarce have said when it was that his relation with the elder, now admirably sealed, had fitted him to distinctness with a fresh pair of wings and showed him there was no length to which they mightn't bear him. How had this fond presumption grown, he might afterwards have wondered, unless by just listening to her voice of voices?--her beautiful bold tone simply leading the way, as he subsequently made the matter out, and his ear, all but irrespective of its sense, holding and holding it, indifferent for the hour to what it meant, and yet withal informed, by its mere pitch and quality, of numberless things that were to guard him against possible mistakes, very much as he had been guarded during his passage with Molly. Numberless things, yes; so many that he was afterwards to see how he owed all those he could feel most at his ease about to this extraordinarily fortifying hour. He might afterwards make out that it had been fortifying, at least in part, because it had been so flattering: he soon ceased to care that he was after all apparently not able to pass for a barbarian--his connection with the secure world, that of manners and of every sort of cross-reference, that of the right tone and the clear tradition, had been settled at every point at which equivocation would otherwise have waited. If it wasn't flattering that two such women should have made him by a turn of the hand their very own and have opened out to him, without a shade of reserve that he could catch in the fact, every privilege thereunto attached, there was no sense in the great mystifying term, as he had always found it, which resembled the custom of hand-kissing in that he had hitherto known it but by name. To taste of the sweet was to feel sure he had gone to this hour without it, just as on his side he had never helped another to it--no, not in the least after the fashion according to which he had let his present companions, and Mrs. Midmore of course in especial, hand it forth as in a deep-bowled silver spoon.