You can't be a providence and not be a bore.A real providence KNOWS; whereas you," said Lady John, making her point neatly, "have to find out--and to find out even by asking 'the likes of' ME.Your fine speech meanwhile doesn't a bit tell me what."It affected me again that she could get so near without getting nearer.
True enough it was that I wanted to find out; and though I might expect, or fear, too much of her, I wondered at her only seeing this--at her not reading deeper.The peril of the public ugliness that haunted me rose or fell, at this moment, with my varying view of her density.Or rather, to be more exact, I already saw her as necessarily stupid because I saw her as extravagantly vain.What I see now of course is that I was on my own side almost stupidly hard with her--as I may also at that hour have been subject to her other vice.Didn't I perhaps, in proportion as I felt how little she saw, think awfully well of myself, as we said at Newmarch, for seeing so much more? It comes back to me that the sense thus established of my superior vision may perfectly have gone a little to my head.If it was a frenzied fallacy I was all to blame, but if it was anything else whatever it was naturally intoxicating.I really remember in fact that nothing so much as this confirmed presumption of my impunity had appeared to me to mark the fine quality of my state.I think there must fairly have been a pitch at which I was not sure that not to partake of that state was, on the part of others, the sign of a gregarious vulgarity; as if there were a positive advantage, an undiluted bliss, in the intensity of consciousness that I had reached.i alone was magnificently and absurdly aware--everyone else was benightedly out of it.So I reflected that there would be almost nothing I mightn't with safety mention to my present subject of practice as an acknowledgment that I was meddlesome.I could put no clue in her hand that her notorious acuteness would make of the smallest use to her.
The most she could do would be to make it of use to myself, and the clue it seemed best to select was therefore a complete confession of guilt.
"You've a lucidity of your own in which I'm forced to recognise that the highest purity of motive looks shrivelled and black.You bring out accordingly what has made me thus beat about the bush.Have you really such a fund of indulgence for Gilbert Long as we most of us, I gather--though perhaps in our blindness--seem to see it stick out again that he supposes?
MAY he fondly feel that he can continue to count on it? Or, if you object to my question in that form, is it not, frankly, to making his attitude--after all so thoroughly public--more convenient to each of you that (without perhaps quite measuring what you're about,) you've gone on sacrificing poor Briss? I call it sacrificing, you see, in spite of there having been as yet no such great harm done.And if you ask me again what business of mine such inquiries may represent, why, the best thing will doubtless be to say to you that, with a smaller dose of irrepressible irony in my composition than you have in yours, I can't make so light as you of my tendency to worry on behalf of those I care for.Let me finally hasten to add that I'm not now including in that category either of the two gentlemen I've named."I freely concede, as I continue my record, that to follow me at all, at this point, gave proof on Lady John's part of a faculty that should have prevented my thinking of her as inordinately backward."Then who in the world ARE these objects of your solicitude?"I showed, over and above my hesitation, my regret for the need of it.
"I'm afraid I can't tell you."
At this, not unnaturally, she fairly scoffed."Asking me everything and telling me nothing, you nevertheless look to me to satisfy you? Do you mean," she pursued, "that you speak for persons whose interest is more legitimately founded than the interest you so flatteringly attribute to myself?""Well, yes--let them be so described! Can't you guess," I further risked, "who constitutes at least ONE of my preoccupations?"The condescension of her consent to think marked itself handsomely enough.
