Ah, it may have been only for six seconds that she caught me gaping at her renewed beauty; but six seconds, it was inevitable to feel, were quite enough for every purpose with which she had come down to me.She might have been a large, fair, rich, prosperous person of twenty-five; she was at any rate near enough to it to put me for ever in my place.It was a success, on her part, that, though I couldn't as yet fully measure it, there could be no doubt of whatever, any more than of my somehow paying for it.Her being there at all, at such an hour, in such conditions, became, each moment, on the whole business, more and more a part of her advantage;the case for her was really in almost any aspect she could now make it wear to my imagination.My wealth of that faculty, never so stimulated, was thus, in a manner, her strength; by which I mean the impossibility of my indifference to the mere immense suggestiveness of our circumstances.
How can I tell now to what tune the sense of all these played into my mind?--the huge oddity of the nameless idea on which we foregathered, the absence and hush of everything except that idea, so magnified in consequence and yet still, after all, altogether fantastic.There remained for her, there spoke for her too, her vividly "unconventional" step, the bravery of her rustling, on an understanding so difficult to give an account of, through places and times only made safe by the sleep of the unsuspecting.My imagination, in short, since I have spoken of it, couldn't do other than work for her from the moment she had, so simply yet so wonderfully, not failed me.Therefore it was all with me again, the vision of her reasons.They were in fact sufficiently in the sound of what she presently said."Perhaps you don't know--but I mentioned in the proper quarter that I should sit up a little.
They're of a kindness here, luckily--! So it's all right." It was all right, obviously--she made it so; but she made it so as well that, in spite of the splendour she showed me, she should be a little nervous."We shall only take moreover," she added, "a minute."I should perhaps have wondered more what she proposed to do in a minute had I not felt it as already more or less done.Yes, she might have been twenty-five, and it was a short time for THAT to have taken.However, what I clutched at, what I clung to, was that it was a nervous twenty-five.
I might pay for her assurance, but wasn't there something of mine for which SHE might pay? I was nervous also, but, as I took in again, with a glance through our great chain of chambers, the wonderful conditions that protected us, I did my best to feel sure that it was only because I was so amused.
That--in so high a form--was what it came to in the end."I supposed,"I replied, "that you'd have arranged; for, in spite of the way things were going, I hadn't given you up.I haven't understood, I confess," I went on, "why you've preferred a conference so intensely nocturnal--of which I quite feel, however, that, if it has happened to suit you, it isn't for me to complain.But I felt sure of you--that was the great thing--from the moment, half an hour ago, you so kindly spoke to me.I gave you, you see," I laughed, "what's called 'rope.'""I don't suppose you mean," she exclaimed, "for me to hang myself!--for that, I assure you, is not at all what I'm prepared for." Then she seemed again to give me the magnificence of her youth.It wasn't, throughout, I was to feel, that she at all had abysses of irony, for she in fact happily needed none.Her triumph was in itself ironic enough, and all her point in her sense of her freshness."Were you really so impatient?" But as Iinevitably hung fire a little she continued before I could answer; which somewhat helped me indeed by showing the one flaw in her confidence.More extraordinary perhaps than anything else, moreover, was just my perception of this; which gives the value of all that each of us so visibly felt the other to have put together, to have been ****** out and gathering in, since we parted, on the terrace, after seeing Mrs.Server and Briss come up from under their tree.We HAD, of a truth, arrived at our results--though mine were naturally the ones for me to believe in; and it was prodigious that we openly met not at all where we had last left each other, but exactly on what our subsequent suppressed processes had achieved.We hadn't named them--hadn't alluded to them, and we couldn't, no doubt, have done either;but they were none the less intensely there between us, with the whole bright, empty scene given up to them.Only she had her shrewd sense that mine, for reasons, might have been still more occult than her own.Hadn't I possibly burrowed the deeper--to come out in some uncalculated place behind her back? That was the flaw in her confidence.She had in spite of it her firm ground, and I could feel, to do her justice, how different a complacency it was from such smug ignorance as Lady John's.If I didn't fear to seem to drivel about my own knowledge I should say that she had, in addition to all the rest of her "pull," the benefit of striking me as worthy of me.She was IN the mystic circle--not one of us more; she knew the size of it; and it was our now being in it alone together, with everyone else out and with the size greater than it had yet been at all--it was this that gave the hour, in fine, so sharp a stamp.
