My theory had not at all been framed to embrace the phenomenon thus presented; it had been precisely framed, on the contrary, to hang together with the observed inveteracy of escape, on the part of the two persons about whom it busied itself, from public juxtaposition of more than a moment.
I was fairly upset by the need to consider at this late hour whether going in for a new theory or bracing myself for new facts would hold out to me the better refuge.It is perhaps not too much to say that I should scarce have been able to sit still at all but for the support afforded me by the oddity of the separation of Lord Lutley and Mrs.Froome; which, though resting on a general appearance directly opposed to that of my friends, offered somehow the relief of a suggestive analogy.What I could directly clutch at was that if the exception did prove the rule in the one case it might equally prove it in the other.If on a rare occasion one of these couples might be divided, so, by as uncommon a chance, the other might be joined; the only difference being in the gravity of the violated law.
For which pair was the betrayal greatest? It was not till dinner was nearly ended and the ladies were about to withdraw that I recovered lucidity to make out how much more machinery would have had to be put into motion consistently to prevent, than once in a way to minimise, the disconcerting accident.
All accidents, I must add, were presently to lose themselves in the unexpectedness of my finding myself, before we left the dining-room, in easy talk with Gilbert Long--talk that was at least easy for him, whatever it might have struck me as necessarily destined to be for me.I felt as he approached me--for he did approach me--that it was somehow "important "; I was so aware that something in the state of my conscience would have prevented me from assuming conversation between us to be at this juncture possible.The state of my conscience was that I knew too much--that no one had really any business to know what I knew.If he suspected but the fiftieth part of it there was no simple spirit in which he could challenge me.It would have been simple of course to desire to knock me down, but that was barred by its being simple to excess.It wouldn't even have been enough for him merely to ground it on a sudden fancy.It fitted, in fine, with my cogitations that it was so significant for him to wish to speak to me that I didn't envy him his attempt at the particular shade of assurance required for carrying the thing off.He would have learned from Mrs.Server that I was not, as regarded them, at all as others were; and thus his idea, the fruit of that stimulation, could only be either to fathom, to felicitate, or--as it were--to destroy me.What was at the same time obvious was that no one of these attitudes would go quite of itself.The simple sight of him as he quitted his chair to take one nearer my own brought home to me in a flash--and much more than anything had yet done--the real existence in him of the condition it was my private madness (none the less private for Grace Brissenden's so limited glimpse of it,) to believe I had coherently stated.Is not this small touch perhaps the best example I can give of the intensity of amusement I had at last enabled my private madness to yield me? I found myself owing it, from this time on and for the rest of the evening, moments of the highest concentration.
Whatever there might have been for me of pain or doubt was washed straight out by the special sensation of seeing how "clever" poor Long not only would have to be; but confidently and actually WAS; inasmuch as this apprehension seemed to put me in possession of his cleverness, besides leaving me all my own.I made him welcome, I helped him to another cigarette, I felt above all that I should enjoy him; my response to his overture was, in other words, quickly enough to launch us.Yet I fear I can do little justice to the pleasant suppressed tumult of impression and reflection that, on my part, our ten minutes together produced.The elements that mingled in it scarce admit of discrimination.It was still more than previously a deep sense of being justified.My interlocutor was for those ten minutes immeasurably superior--superior, I mean, to himself--and he couldn't possibly have become so save through the relation I had so patiently tracked.He faced me there with another light than his own, spoke with another sound, thought with another ease and understood with another ear.I should put it that what came up between us was the mere things of the occasion, were it not for the fine point to which, in my view, the things of the occasion had been brought.While our eyes, at all events, on either side, met serenely, and our talk, dealing with the idea, dealing with the extraordinary special charm, of the social day now deepening to its end, touched our companions successively, touched the manner in which this one and that had happened to be predominantly a part of that charm; while such were our immediate conditions I wondered of course if he had not, just as consciously and essentially as I, quite another business in mind.It was not indeed that our allusion to the other business would not have been wholly undiscoverable by a third person.
