Such were some of the reflections in which I indulged while her eyes--with their strange intermissions of darkness or of light: who could say which?--told me from time to time that she knew whatever I was thinking of to be for her virtual advantage.It was prodigious what, in the way of suppressed communication, passed in these wonderful minutes between us.Our relation could be at the best but an equal confession, and I remember saying to myself that if she had been as subtle as I--which she wasn't!--she too would have put it together that I had dreadfully talked about her.She would have traced in me my demonstration to Mrs.Briss that, whoever she was, she must logically have been idiotised.It was the special poignancy of her collapse that, so far at least as I was concerned, this was a ravage the extent of which she had ceased to try to conceal.She had been trying, and more or less succeeding, all day: the little drama of her public unrest had had, when one came to consider, no other argument.It had been terror that had directed her steps; the need constantly to show herself detached and free, followed by the sterner one not to show herself, by the same token, limp and empty.This had been the distinct, ferocious logic of her renewals and ruptures--the anxious mistrust of her wit, the haunting knowledge of the small distance it would take her at once, the consequent importance of her exactly timing herself, and the quick instinct of flight before the menace of discovery.She couldn't let society alone, because that would have constituted a symptom; yet, for fear of the appearance of a worse one, she could only mingle in it with a complex diplomacy.She was accordingly exposed on every side, and to be with her a while thus quietly was to read back into her behaviour the whole explanation, which was positively simple to me now.To take up again the vivid analogy, she had been sailing all day, though scarce able to keep afloat, under the flag of her old reputation for easy response.She had given to the breeze any sad scrap of a substitute for the play of mind once supposed remarkable.The last of all the things her stillness said to me was that I could judge from so poor a show what had become of her conversability.What I did judge was that a frantic art had indeed been required to make her pretty silences pass, from one crisis to another, for pretty speeches.Half this art, doubtless, was the glittering deceit of her smile, the sublime, pathetic overdone geniality which represented so her share in any talk that, every other eloquence failing, there could only be nothing at all from the moment it abandoned its office.There was nothing at all.That was the truth; in accordance with which I finally--for everything it might mean to myself--put out my hand and bore ever so gently on her own.Her own rested listlessly on the stone of our seat.Of course, it had been an immense thing for her that she was, in spite of everything, so lovely.
All this was quite consistent with its eventually coming back to me that, though she took from me with appreciation what was expressed in the gesture I have noted, it was certainly in quest of a still deeper relief that she had again come forth.The more I considered her face--and most of all, so permittedly, in her passive, conscious presence--the more Iwas sure of this and the further I could go in the imagination of her beautiful duplicity.I ended by divining that if I was assuredly good for her, because the question of keeping up with me had so completely dropped, and if the service I so rendered her was not less distinct to her than to myself--Iended by divining that she had none the less her obscure vision of a still softer ease.Guy Brissenden had become in these few hours her positive need--a still greater need than I had lately amused myself with making out that he had found her.Each had, by their unprecedented plight, something for the other, some intimacy of unspeakable confidence, that no one else in the world could have for either.They had been feeling their way to it, but at the end of their fitful day they had grown confusedly, yet beneficently sure.The explanation here again was simple--they had the sense of a common fate.They hadn't to name it or to phrase it--possibly even couldn't had they tried; peace and support came to them, without that, in the simple revelation of each other.Oh, how I made it out that if it was indeed very well for the poor lady to feel thus in MY company that her burden was lifted, my company would be after all but a rough substitute for Guy's! He was a still better friend, little as he could have told the reason; and if I could in this connection have put the words into her mouth, here follows something of the sense that I should have made them form.
"Yes, my dear man, I do understand you--quite perfectly now, and (by I know not what miracle) I've really done so to some extent from the first.
