And yet, superficially arrested as I was for the time, I directly afterwards recognised in this instinctive discrimination--the last, the expiring struggle of her native lucidity--a supremely convincing bit of evidence.It was still more convincing than if she had done any of the common things--stammered, changed colour, shown an apprehension of what the person named might have said to me.She had had it from me that he and I had talked about her, but there was nothing that she accepted the idea of his having been able to say.I saw--still more than this--that there was nothing to my purpose (since my purpose was to understand) that she would have had, as matters stood, coherence enough to impute to him.It was extremely curious to me to divine, just here, that she hadn't a glimmering of the real logic of Brissenden's happy effect on her nerves.It was the effect, as coming from him, that a beautiful delicacy forbade her as yet to give me her word for;and she was certainly herself in the stage of regarding it as an anomaly.
Why, on the contrary, I might have wondered, shouldn't she have jumped at the chance, at the comfort, of seeing a preference trivial enough to be "worked" imputed to her? Why shouldn't she have been positively pleased that people might helpfully couple her name with that of the wrong man?
Why, in short, in the language that Grace Brissenden and I had used together, was not that lady's husband the perfection of a red herring? Just because, I perceived, the relation that had established itself between them WASfor its function, a real relation, the relation of a fellowship in resistance to doom.
Nothing could have been stranger than for ME so to know it was while the stricken parties themselves were in ignorance; but nothing, at the same time, could have been, as I have since made out, more magnanimous than Mrs.Server's attitude.She moved, groping and panting, in the gathering dusk of her fate, but there were calculations she still could dimly make.
One of these was that she must drag no one else in.I verily believe that, for that matter, she had scruples, poignant and exquisite, even about letting our friend himself see how much she liked to be with him.She wouldn't, at all events, let another see.I saw what I saw, I felt what I felt, but such things were exactly a sign that I could take care of myself.There was apparently, I was obliged to admit, but little apprehension in her of her unduly showing that our meeting had been anything of a blessing to her.There was no one indeed just then to be the wiser for it; I might perhaps else even have feared that she would have been influenced to treat the incident as closed.I had, for that matter, no wish to prolong it beyond her own convenience; it had already told me everything it could possibly tell.I thought I knew moreover what she would have got from it.I preferred, none the less, that we should separate by my own act; I wanted not to see her move in order to be free of me.So I stood up, to put her more at her ease, and it was while I remained before her that I tried to turn to her advantage what I had committed myself to about Brissenden.
"I had a fancy, at any rate, that he was looking for you--all the more that he didn't deny it."She had not moved; she had let me take my hand from her own with as little sign as on her first feeling its touch.She only kept her eyes on me."What made you have such a fancy?""What makes me ever have any?" I laughed."My extraordinary interest in my fellow-creatures.I have more than most men.I've never really seen anyone with half so much.That breeds observation, and observation breeds ideas.Do you know what it has done?" I continued."It has bred for me the idea that Brissenden's in love with you."There was something in her eyes that struck me as betraying--and the appeal of it went to the heart--the constant dread that if entangled in talk she might show confusion.Nevertheless she brought out after a moment, as naturally and charmingly as possible: "How can that be when he's so strikingly in love with his wife?"I gave her the benefit of the most apparent consideration."Strikingly, you call it?""Why, I thought it was noticed--what he does for her.""Well, of course she's extremely handsome--or at least extremely fresh and attractive.He IS in love with her, no doubt, if you take it by the quarter, or by the year, like a yacht or a stable," I pushed on at random.
"But isn't there such a state also as being in love by the day?"She waited, and I guessed from the manner of it exactly why.It was the most obscure of intimations that she would have liked better that Ishouldn't make her talk; but obscurity, by this time, offered me no more difficulties.The hint, none the less, a trifle disconcerted me, and, while I vaguely sought for some small provisional middle way between going and not going on, the oddest thing, as a fruit of my own delay, occurred.This was neither more nor less than the revival of her terrible little fixed smile.It came back as if with an audible click--as a gas-burner makes a pop when you light it.It told me visibly that from the moment she must talk she could talk only with its aid.The effect of its aid I indeed immediately perceived."How do I know?" she asked in answer to my question."I've never BEEN in love.""Not even by the day?"
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