I had faced her again just in time to take it, and I immediately made up my mind how best to do so."Then I go utterly to pieces!""You shouldn't have perched yourself," she laughed--she could by this time almost coarsely laugh--"in such a preposterous place!""Ah, that's my affair," I returned, "and if I accept the consequences I don't quite see what you've to say to it.That I do accept them--so far as I make them out as not too intolerable and you as not intending them to be--that I do accept them is what I've been trying to signify to you.
Only my fall," I added, "is an inevitable shock.You remarked to me a few minutes since that you didn't recover yourself in a flash.I differ from you, you see, in that i do; I take my collapse all at once.Here then Iam.I'm smashed.I don't see, as I look about me, a piece I can pick up.
I don't attempt to account for my going wrong; I don't attempt to account for yours with me; I don't attempt to account for anything.If Long ISjust what he always was it settles the matter, and the special clincher for us can be but your honest final impression, made precisely more aware of itself by repentance for the levity with which you had originally yielded to my contagion."She didn't insist on her repentance; she was too taken up with the facts themselves."Oh, but add to my impression everyone else's impression! Has anyone noticed anything?"1
"Well, if you had you'd have seen--seen, I mean, all they don't see.
If they had been conscious they'd have talked."I thought."To me?"
"Well, I'm not sure to you; people have such a notion of what you embroider on things that they're rather afraid to commit themselves or to lead you on: they're sometimes in, you know," she luminously reminded me, "for more than they bargain for, than they quite know what to do with, or than they care to have on their hands."I tried to do justice to this account of myself."You mean I see so much?"It was a delicate matter, but she risked it."Don't you sometimes see horrors?"I wondered."Well, names are a convenience.People catch me in the act?""They certainly think you critical."
"And is criticism the vision of horrors?"She couldn't quite be sure where I was taking her."It isn't, perhaps, so much that you see them--"I started."As that I perpetrate them?"
She was sure now, however, and wouldn't have it, for she was serious.
"Dear no--you don't perpetrate anything.Perhaps it would be better if you did!" she tossed off with an odd laugh."But--always by people's idea--you like them."I followed."Horrors?"
"Well, you don't--"
"Yes--?"
But she wouldn't be hurried now."You take them too much for what they are.You don't seem to want--""To come down on them strong? Oh, but I often do!""So much the better then."
"Though I do like--whether for that or not," I hastened to confess, "to look them first well in the face."Our eyes met, with this, for a minute, but she made nothing of that.
"When they HAVE no face, then, you can't do it! It isn't at all events now a question," she went on, "of people's keeping anything back, and you're perhaps in any case not the person to whom it would first have come."I tried to think then who the person would be."It would have come to Long himself?"But she was impatient of this."Oh, one doesn't know what comes--or what doesn't--to Long himself! I'm not sure he's too modest to misrepresent--if he had the intelligence to play a part.""Which he hasn't!" I concluded.
"Which he hasn't.It's to ME they might have spoken--or to each other.""But I thought you exactly held they HAD chattered in accounting for his state by the influence of Lady John."She got the matter instantly straight."Not a bit.That chatter was mine only--and produced to meet yours.There had so, by your theory, to be a woman--""That, to oblige me, you invented HER? Precisely.But I thought--""You needn't have thought!" Mrs.Briss broke in."I didn't invent her.""Then what are you talking about?"
"I didn't invent her," she repeated, looking at me hard."She's true."I echoed it in vagueness, though instinctively again in protest; yet Iheld my breath, for this was really the point at which I felt my companion's forces most to have mustered.Her manner now moreover gave me a great idea of them, and her whole air was of taking immediate advantage of my impression.
"Well, see here: since you've wanted it, I'm afraid that, however little you may like it, you'll have to take it.You've pressed me for explanations and driven me much harder than you must have seen I found convenient.If I've seemed to beat about the bush it's because I hadn't only myself to think of.One can be simple for one's self--one can't be, always, for others.""Ah, to whom do you say it?" I encouragingly sighed; not even yet quite seeing for what issue she was heading.
She continued to make for the spot, whatever it was, with a certain majesty."I should have preferred to tell you nothing more than what IHAVE told you.I should have preferred to close our conversation on the simple announcement of my recovered sense of proportion.But you HAVE, I see, got me in too deep.""O-oh!" I courteously attenuated.
"You've made of me," she lucidly insisted, "too big a talker, too big a thinker, of nonsense.""Thank you," I laughed, "for intimating that I trifle so agreeably.""Oh, YOU'VE appeared not to mind! But let me then at last not fail of the luxury of admitting that i mind.Yes, I mind particularly.I may, be bad, but I've a grain of gumption.""'Bad'?" It seemed more closely to concern me.
"Bad I may be.In fact," she pursued at this high pitch and pressure;"there's no doubt whatever I AM."
