But she had meanwhile taken up my allusion to her having preferred so to wait."I wanted to see you quietly; which was what I tried--not altogether successfully, it rather struck me at the moment--to make you understand when I let you know about it.You stared so that I didn't quite know what was the matter.Nothing could be quiet, I saw, till the going to bed was over, and I felt it coming off then from one minute to the other.I didn't wish publicly to be called away for it from this putting of our heads together, and, though you may think me absurd, I had a dislike to having our question of May up so long as she was hanging about.I knew of course that she would hang about till the very last moment, and that was what I perhaps a little clumsily--if it was my own fault!--made the effort to convey to you.She may be hanging about still," Mrs.Briss continued, with her larger look round--her looks round were now immense; "but at any rate I shall have done what I could.I had a feeling--perfectly preposterous, I admit!--against her seeing us together; but if she comes down again, as I've so boldly done, and finds us, she'll have no one but herself to thank.It's a funny house, for that matter," my friend rambled on, "and I'm not sure that anyone HAS gone to bed.One does what one likes; I'm an old woman, at any rate, and i do!" She explained now, she explained too much, she abounded, talking herself stoutly into any assurance that failed her.I had meanwhile with every word she uttered a sharper sense of the pressure, behind them all, of a new consciousness.It was full of everything she didn't say, and what she said was no representation whatever of what was most in her mind.We had indeed taken a jump since noon--we had indeed come out further on.
Just this fine dishonesty of her eyes, moreover--the light of a part to play, the excitement (heaven knows what it struck me as being!) of a happy duplicity--may well have been what contributed most to her present grand air.
