I made out above all what she would most be trying to hide.It was not, so to speak, the guarded primary fact--it could only be, wretched woman, that produced, that disastrous, treacherous consequence of the fact which her faculties would exhibit, and most of all the snapped cord of her faculty of talk.Guy Brissenden had, at the worst, his compromised face and figure to show and to shroud--if he were really, that is, as much aware of them as one had suspected.She had her whole compromised machinery of thought and speech, and if these signs were not, like his, external, that made her case but the harder, for she had to create, with intelligence rapidly ebbing, with wit half gone, the illusion of an unimpaired estate.She was like some unhappy lady robbed of her best jewels--obliged so to dispose and distribute the minor trinkets that had escaped as still to give the impression of a rich ecrin.Was not that embarrassment, if one analysed a little, at the bottom of her having been all day, in the vulgar phrase and as the three of us had too cruelly noted, all over the place? WAS indeed, for that matter, this observation confined to us, or had it at last been irrepressibly determined on the part of the company at large? This was a question, I hasten to add, that I would not now for the world have put to the test.I felt I should have known how to escape had any rumour of wonder at Mrs.Server's ways been finally conveyed to me.I might from this moment have, as much as I liked, my own sense of it, but I was definitely conscious of a sort of loyalty to her that would have rendered me blank before others: though not indeed that--oh, at last, quite the contrary!--it would have forbidden me to watch and watch.I positively dreaded the accident of my being asked by one of the men if I knew how everyone was talking about her.If everyone was talking about her, I wanted positively not to know.But nobody was, probably--they scarcely could be as yet.Without suggestive collateral evidence there would be nobody in the house so conscientiously infernal as Mrs.Brissenden, Obert and I.
Newmarch had always, in our time, carried itself as the great asylum of the finer wit, more or less expressly giving out that, as invoking hospitality or other countenance, none of the stupid, none even of the votaries of the grossly obvious, need apply; but I could luckily at present reflect that its measurements in this direction had not always been my own, and that, moreover, whatever precision they possessed, human blandness, even in such happy halls, had not been quite abolished.There was a sound law in virtue of which one could always--alike in privileged and unprivileged circles--rest more on people's density than on their penetrability.Wasn't it their density too that would be practically nearest their good nature?
Whatever her successive partners of a moment might have noticed, they wouldn't have discovered in her reason for dropping them quickly a principle of fear that they might notice her failure articulately to keep up.My own actual vision, which had developed with such affluence, was that, in a given case, she could keep up but for a few minutes and was therefore obliged to bring the contact to an end before exposure.I had consistently mastered her predicament: she had at once to cultivate contacts, so that people shouldn't guess her real concentration, and to make them a literal touch and go, so that they shouldn't suspect the enfeeblement of her mind.It was obviously still worth everything to her that she was so charming.Ihad theorised with Mrs.Brissenden on her supposititious inanity, but the explanation of such cynicism in either of us could only be a sensibility to the truth that attractions so great might float her even a long time after intelligence pure and simple should have collapsed.
Was not my present uneasiness, none the less, a private curiosity to ascertain just how much or how little of that element she had saved from the wreck? She dodged, doubled, managed, broke off, clutching occasions, yet doubtless risking dumbnesses, vaguenesses and other betrayals, depending on attitudes, motions, expressions, a material personality, in fine, in which a plain woman would have found nothing but failure; and peace therefore might rule the scene on every hypothesis but that of her getting, to put it crudely, worse.How I remember saying to myself that if she didn't get better she surely MUST get worse!--being aware that I referred on the one side to her occult surrender and on the other to its awful penalty.It became present to me that she possibly might recover if anything should happen that would pull her up, turn her into some other channel.If, however, that consideration didn't detain me longer the fact may stand as a sign of how little I believed in any check.Gilbert Long might die, but not the intensity he had inspired.The analogy with the situation of the Brissendens here, I further considered, broke down; I at any rate rather positively welcomed the view that the sacrificed party to THAT union might really find the arrest of his decline, if not the renewal of his youth, in the loss of his wife.Would this lady indeed, as an effect of HIS death, begin to wrinkle and shrivel? It would sound brutal to say that this was what I should have preferred to hold, were it not that I in fact felt forced to recognise the slightness of such a chance.She would have loved his youth, and have made it her own, in death as in life, and he would have quitted the world, in truth, only the more effectually to leave it to her.
Mrs.Server's quandary--which was now all I cared for--was exactly in her own certitude of every absence of issue.But I need give little more evidence of how it had set me thinking.
