When Benjamin is waiting to dance with Hildegarde for the first time—having fallen in love with her at first sight at a high society ball—the narrator captures his emotional experience using hyperbolic language and a simile:
He stood close to the wall, silent, inscrutable, watching with murderous eyes the young bloods of Baltimore as they eddied around Hildegarde Moncrief, passionate admiration in their faces. How obnoxious they seemed to Benjamin; how intolerably rosy! […] [W]hen his own time came, and he drifted with her out upon the changing floor to the music of the latest waltz from Paris, his jealousies and anxieties melted from him like a mantle of snow.
The hyperbolic language in this passage—such as the descriptions of Benjamin watching Hildegarde’s suitors with “murderous eyes” and judging them as “intolerably rosy”—captures his jealousy and inner turmoil. Eyes cannot literally be murderous nor can people being “rosy” (or cheerful) be genuinely “intolerable.” Benjamin just experiences the men this way because of his intense desire to be close to Hildegarde.
The simile here—“his jealousies and anxieties melted from him like a mantle of snow”—communicates the deep relief Benjamin feels when it’s finally his turn to dance with Hildegarde. While Hildegarde is able to offer Benjamin this kind of calming connection during their courtship and the early years of their marriage, ultimately she pulls away as Benjamin gets younger, proving that she could not offer him the long-term supportive relationship that he desires.
