"About Mrs.Server, you and I? You must act as to that, my dear fellow, quite on your own discretion.All the more that what on earth HAVE we made out? I assure you I haven't a secret to confide to you about her, except that I've never seen a person more unquenchably radiant."He almost jumped at it."Well, that's just it!""But just what?"
"Why, what they're all talking about.That she IS so awfully radiant.
That she's so tremendously happy.It's the question," he explained, "of what in the world she has to make her so."I winced a little, but tried not to show it."My dear man, how do i know?""She THINKS you know," he after a moment answered.
I could only stare."Mrs.Server thinks I know what makes her happy?"I the more easily represented such a conviction as monstrous in that it truly had its surprise for me.
But Brissenden now was all with his own thought."She ISN'T happy.""You mean that that's what's the matter with her under her appearance--?
Then what makes the appearance so extraordinary?""Why, exactly what I mention--that one doesn't see anything whatever in her to correspond to it."I hesitated."Do you mean in her circumstances?""Yes--or in her character.Her circumstances are nothing wonderful.
She has none too much money; she has had three children and lost them;and nobody that belongs to her appears ever to have been particularly nice to her."I turned it over."How you DO get on with her!""Do you call it getting on with her to be the more bewildered the more I see her?""Isn't to say you're bewildered only, on the whole, to say you're charmed?
That always--doesn't it?--describes more or less any engrossed relation with a lovely lady.""Well, I'm not sure I'm so charmed." He spoke as if he had thought this particular question over for himself; he had his way of being lucid without brightness."I'm not at all easily charmed, you know," he the next moment added; "and I'm not a fellow who goes about much after women.""Ah, that I never supposed! Why in the world SHOULD you? It's the last thing!" I laughed."But isn't this--quite (what shall one call it?) innocently--rather a peculiar case?"My question produced in him a little gesture of elation--a gesture emphasised by a snap of his forefinger and thumb."I knew you knew it was special!
I knew you've been thinking about it!"
"You certainly," I replied with assurance, "have, during the last five minutes, made me do so with some sharpness.I don't pretend that I don't now recognise that there must be something the matter.I only desire--not unnaturally--that there SHOULD be, to put me in the right for having thought, if, as you're so sure, such a freedom as that can be brought home to me.
If Mrs.Server is beautiful and gentle and strange," I speciously went on, "what are those things but an attraction?"I saw how he had them, whatever they were, before him as he slowly shook his head."They're not an attraction.They're too queer."I caught in an instant my way to fall in with him; and not the less that I by this time felt myself committed, up to the intellectual eyes, to ascertaining just HOW queer the person under discussion might be."Oh, of course I'm not speaking of her as a party to a silly flirtation, or an object of any sort of trivial pursuit.But there are so many different ways of being taken.""For a fellow like you.But not for a fellow like me.For me there's only one.""To be, you mean, in love?"
He put it a little differently."Well, to be thoroughly pleased.""Ah, that's doubtless the best way and the firm ground.And you mean you're NOT thoroughly pleased with Mrs.Server?""No--and yet I want to be kind to her.Therefore what's the matter?""Oh, if it's what's the matter with YOU you ask me, that extends the question.If you want to be kind to her, you get on with her, as we were saying, quite enough for my argument.And isn't the matter also, after all," I demanded, "that you simply feel she desires you to be kind?""She does that." And he looked at me as with the sense of drawing from me, for his relief, some greater help than I was as yet conscious of the courage to offer."It is that she desires me.She likes it.And the extraordinary thing is that i like it.""And why in the world shouldn't you?"
"Because she terrifies me.She has something to hide.""But, my dear man," I asked with a gaiety singularly out of relation to the small secret thrill produced in me by these words--"my dear man, what woman who's worth anything hasn't?""Yes, but there are different ways.What SHE tries for is this false appearance of happiness."I weighed it."But isn't that the best thing?""It's terrible to have to keep it up."
