"Is it your idea to pretend to me that I'm keeping Grace Brissenden awake?"There was consistency enough in her wonder."She has not been anything but nice to me; she's not a person whose path one crosses without finding it out; and I can't imagine what has got into her if any such grievance as that is what she has been pouring out to you in your apparently so deep confabulations."This toss of the ball was one that, I saw quickly enough, even a taste for sport wouldn't justify my answering, and my logical interest lay moreover elsewhere."Dear no! Mrs.Brissenden certainly feels her strength, and I should never presume to take under my charge any personal situation of hers.I had in my mind a very different identity."Lady John, as if to be patient with me, looked about at our companions for a hint of it, wondering which of the ladies I might have been supposed to "care for" so much as to tolerate in her a preference for a rival; but the effect of this survey was, I the next instant observed, a drop of her attention from what I had been saying.Her eye had been caught by the sight of Gilbert Long within range of us, and then had been just visibly held by the fact that the person seated with him on one of the small sofas that almost of necessity made conversation intimate was the person whose name, just uttered between us, was, in default of the name she was in search of, still in the air.Gilbert Long and Mrs.Briss were in familiar colloquy--though I was aware, at the first flush, of nothing in this that should have made my interlocutress stare.That is I was aware of nothing but that I had simultaneously myself been moved to some increase of sharpness.What COULDI have known that should have caused me to wonder at the momentary existence of this particular conjunction of minds unless it were simply the fact that I hadn't seen it occur amid the many conjunctions I had already noticed--PLUSthe fact that I had a few minutes before, in the interest of the full roundness of my theory, actually been missing it? These two persons had met in my presence at Paddington and had travelled together under my eyes; I had talked of Mrs.Briss with Long and of Long with Mrs.Briss; but the vivid picture that their social union forthwith presented stirred within me, though so strangely late in the day, it might have seemed, for such an emotion, more than enough freshness of impression.Yet--now that I did have it there--why should it be vivid, why stirring, why a picture at all?
Was ANY temporary collocation, in a house so encouraging to sociability, out of the range of nature? Intensely prompt, I need scarcely say, were both my freshness and my perceived objections to it.The happiest objection, could I have taken time to phrase it, would doubtless have been that the particular effect of this juxtaposition--to my eyes at least--was a thing not to have been foreseen.The parties to it looked, certainly, as I felt that I hadn't prefigured them; though even this, for my reason, was not a description of their aspect.Much less was it a description for the intelligence of Lady John--to whom, however, after all, some formulation of what she dimly saw would not be so indispensable.
We briefly watched, at any rate, together, and as our eyes met again we moreover confessed that we had watched.And we could ostensibly have offered each other no explanation of that impulse save that we had been talking of those concerned as separate and that it was in consequence a little odd to find ourselves suddenly seeing them as one.For that was it--they WERE as one; as one, at all events, for my large reading.My large reading had meanwhile, for the convenience of the rest of my little talk with Lady John, to make itself as small as possible.I had an odd sense, till we fell apart again, as of keeping my finger rather stiffly fixed on a passage in a favourite author on which I had not previously lighted.
I held the book out of sight and behind me; I spoke of things that were not at all in it--or not at all on that particular page; but my volume, none the less, was only waiting.What might be written there hummed already in my ears as a result of my mere glimpse.Had THEY also wonderfully begun to know? Had SHE, most wonderfully, and had they, in that case, prodigiously come together on it? This was a possibility into which my imagination could dip even deeper than into the depths over which it had conceived the other pair as hovering.These opposed couples balanced like bronze groups at the two ends of a chimney-piece, and the most I could say to myself in lucid deprecation of my thought was that I mustn't take them equally for granted merely BECAUSE they balanced.Things in the real had a way of not balancing; it was all an affair, this fine symmetry, of artificial proportion.
Yet even while I kept my eyes away from Mrs.Briss and Long it was vivid to me that, "composing" there beautifully, they could scarce help playing a part in my exhibition.The mind of man, furthermore--and my generalisation pressed hard, with a quick twist, on the supersubtlety as to which I had just been privately complacent--the mind of man doubtless didn't know from one minute to the other, under the appeal of phantasmagoric life, what it would profitably be at.It had struck me a few seconds before as vulgarly gross in Lady John that she was curious, or conscious, of so small a part;in spite of which I was already secretly wincing at the hint that these others had begun to find themselves less in the dark and perhaps even directly to exchange their glimmerings.
