Discretion, then, I finally felt, played an odd part when it simply left one more attached, morally, to one's prey.What was most evident to me by five o'clock in the afternoon was that I was too preoccupied not to find it the best wisdom to accept my mood.It was all very well to run away; there would be no effectual running away but to have my things quickly packed and catch, if possible, a train for town.On the spot I had to BEon it; and it began to dawn before me that there was something quite other I possibly might do with Mrs.Server than endeavour ineffectually to forget her.What was none of one's business might change its name should importunity take the form of utility.In resisted observation that was vivid thought, in inevitable thought that was vivid observation, through a succession, in short, of phases in which I shall not pretend to distinguish one of these elements from the other, I found myself cherishing the fruit of the seed dropped equally by Ford Obert and by Mrs.Briss.What was the matter with ME?--so much as that I had ended by asking myself; and the answer had come as an unmistakable return of the anxiety produced in me by my first seeing that I had fairly let Grace Brissenden loose.My original protest against the flash of inspiration in which she had fixed responsibility on Mrs.Server had been in fact, I now saw, but the scared presentiment of something in store for myself.This scare, to express it sharply, had verily not left me from that moment; and if I had been already then anxious it was because I had felt myself foredoomed to be sure the poor lady herself would be.Why I should have minded this, should have been anxious at her anxiety and scared at her scare, was a question troubling me too little on the spot for me to suffer it to trouble me, as a painter of my state, in this place.It is sufficient that when so much of the afternoon had waned as to bring signs of the service of tea in the open air, I knew how far I was gone in pity for her.For I had at last had to take in what my two interlocutors had given me.Their impression, coinciding and, as one might say, disinterested, couldn't, after a little, fail in some degree to impose itself.It had its value.Mrs.Server WAS "nervous."It little mattered to me now that Mrs.Briss had put it to me--that I had even whimsically put it to myself--that I was perhaps in love with her.That was as good a name as another for an interest springing up in an hour, and was moreover a decent working hypothesis.The sentiment had not indeed asserted itself at "first sight," though it might have taken its place remarkably well among the phenomena of what is known as second.
The real fact was, none the less, that I was quite too sorry for her to be anything except sorry.This odd feeling was something that I may as well say I shall not even now attempt to account for--partly, it is true, because my recital of the rest of what I was to see in no small measure does so.It was a force that I at this stage simply found I had already succumbed to.If it was not the result of what I had granted to myself was the matter with her, then it was rather the very cause of my making that concession.It was a different thing from my first prompt impulse to shield her.I had already shielded her--fought for her so far as I could or as the case immediately required.My own sense of how I was affected had practically cleared up, in short, in the presence of this deeper vision of her.My divinations and inductions had finally brought home to me that in the whole huge, brilliant, crowded place I was the only person save one who was in anything that could be called a relation to her.The other person's relation was concealed, and mine, so far as she herself was concerned, was unexpressed--so that I suppose what most, at the juncture in question, stirred within me was the wonder of how I might successfully express it.
I felt that so long as I didn't express it I should be haunted with the idea of something infinitely touching and tragic in her loneliness--possibly in her torment, in her terror.If she was "nervous" to the tune I had come to recognise, it could only be because she had grounds.And what might her grounds more naturally be than that, arranged and arrayed, disguised and decorated, pursuing in vain, through our careless company, her search for the right shade of apparent security, she felt herself none the less all the while the restless victim of fear and failure?
Once my imagination had seen her in this light the touches it could add to the picture might be trusted to be telling.Further observation was to convince me of their truth, but while I waited for it with my apprehension that it would come in spite of me I easily multiplied and lavished them.
