He hasn't the same reasons for panic.A man never has.Besides, there's not so much in Mr.Long to show--""What, by my notion, has taken place? Why not, if it was precisely by the change in him that my notion was inspired? Any change in HER I know comparatively little about."We hovered so near the case of Mr.and Mrs.Brissenden that it positively excited me, and all the more for her sustained unconsciousness."Oh, the man's not aware of his own change.He doesn't see it as we do.It's all to his advantage.""But we see it to his advantage.How should that prevent?""We see it to the advantage of his mind and his talk, but not to that of--""Well, what?" I pressed as she pulled up.
She was thinking how to name such mysteries."His delicacy.His consideration.
His thought FOR her.He would think for her if he weren't selfish.But he IS selfish--too much so to spare her, to be generous, to realise.It's only, after all," she sagely went on, feeding me again, as I winced to feel, with profundity of my own sort, "it's only an excessive case, a case that in him happens to show as what the doctors call 'fine,' of what goes on whenever two persons are so much mixed up.One of them always gets more out of it than the other.One of them--you know the saying--gives the lips, the other gives the cheek.""It's the deepest of all truths.Yet the cheek profits too," I more prudently argued.
"It profits most.It takes and keeps and uses all the lips give.The cheek, accordingly," she continued to point out, "is Mr.Long's.The lips are what we began by looking for.We've found them.They're drained--they're dry, the lips.Mr.Long finds his improvement natural and beautiful.He revels in it.He takes it for granted.He's sublime."It kept me for a minute staring at her."So--do you know?--are YOU!"She received this wholly as a tribute to her acuteness, and was therefore proportionately gracious."That's only because it's catching.You've MADEme sublime.You found me dense.You've affected me quite as Mrs.Server has affected Mr.Long.I don't pretend I show it," she added, "quite as much as he does.""Because that would entail MY showing it as much as, by your contention, SHE does? Well, I confess," I declared, "I do feel remarkably like that pair of lips.I feel drained--I feel dry!" Her answer to this, with another toss of her head, was extravagant enough to mean forgiveness--was that I was impertinent, and her action in support of her charge was to move away from me, taking her course again to the terrace, easily accessible from the room in which we had been talking.She passed out of the window that opened to the ground, and I watched her while, in the brighter light, she put up her pink parasol.She walked a few paces, as if to look about her for a change of company, and by this time had reached a flight of steps that descended to a lower level.On observing that here, in the act to go down, she suddenly paused, I knew she had been checked by something seen below and that this was what made her turn the next moment to give me a look.I took it as an invitation to rejoin her, and I perceived when I had done so what had led her to appeal to me.We commanded from the point in question one of the shady slopes of the park and in particular a spreading beech, the trunk of which had been inclosed with a rustic circular bench, a convenience that appeared to have offered, for the moment, a sense of leafy luxury to a lady in pale blue.She leaned back, her figure presented in profile and her head a little averted as if for talk with some one on the other side of her, someone so placed as to be lost to our view.
