"Ah, but don't undervalue it: it's what I want! What was it then Long had said?"She had it more and more, but she had it as nothing at all."Not a word to repeat--you wouldn't believe! He does say nothing at all.One can't remember.It's what I mean.I tried him on purpose, while I thought of you.But he's perfectly stupid.I don't see how we can have fancied--!"I had interrupted her by the movement with which again, uncontrollably tossed on one of my surges of certitude, I turned away.HOW deep they must have been in together for her to have so at last gathered herself up, and in how doubly interesting a light, above all, it seemed to present Long for the future! That was, while I warned myself, what I most read in--literally an implication of the enhancement of this latter side of the prodigy.If his cleverness, under the alarm that, first stirring their consciousness but dimly, had so swiftly developed as to make next of each a mirror for the other, and then to precipitate for them, in some silence deeper than darkness, the exchange of recognitions, admissions and, as they certainly would have phrased it, tips--if his excited acuteness was henceforth to protect itself by dissimulation, what wouldn't perhaps, for one's diversion, be the new spectacle and wonder? I could in a manner already measure this larger play by the amplitude freshly determined in Mrs.Briss, and I was for a moment actually held by the thought of the possible finish our friend would find it in him to give to a represented, a fictive ineptitude.The sharpest jostle to my thought, in this rush, might well have been, I confess, the reflection that as it was I who had arrested, who had spoiled their unconsciousness, so it was natural they should fight against me for a possible life in the state I had given them instead.I had spoiled their unconsciousness, I had destroyed it, and it was consciousness alone that could make them effectively cruel.Therefore, if they were cruel, it was I who had determined it, inasmuch as, consciously, they could only want, they could only intend, to live.Wouldn't that question have been, I managed even now to ask myself, the very basis on which they had inscrutably come together? "It's life, you know," each had said to the other, "and I, accordingly, can only cling to mine.But you, poor dear--shall YOU give up?" "Give up?" the other had replied: "for what do you take me? I shall fight by your side, please, and we can compare and exchange weapons and manoeuvres, and you may in every way count upon me."That was what, with greater vividness, was for the rest of the occasion before me, or behind me; and that I had done it all and had only myself to thank for it was what, from this minute, by the same token, was more and more for me the inner essence of Mrs.Briss's attitude.I know not what heavy admonition of my responsibility had thus suddenly descended on me; but nothing, under it, was indeed more sensible than that practically it paralysed me.And I could only say to myself that this was the price--the price of the secret success, the lonely liberty and the intellectual joy.
There were things that for so private and splendid a revel--that of the exclusive king with his Wagner opera--I could only let go, and the special torment of my case was that the condition of light, of the satisfaction of curiosity and of the attestation of triumph, was in this direct way the sacrifice of feeling.There was no point at which my assurance could, by the scientific method, judge itself complete enough not to regard feeling as an interference and, in consequence, as a possible check.If it had to go I knew well who went with it, but I wasn't there to save THEM.Iwas there to save my priceless pearl of an inquiry and to harden, to that end, my heart.I should need indeed all my hardness, as well as my brightness, moreover, to meet Mrs.Briss on the high level to which I had at last induced her to mount, and, even while I prolonged the movement by which I had momentarily stayed her, the intermission of her speech became itself for me a hint of the peculiar pertinence of caution.It lasted long enough, this drop, to suggest that her attention was the sharper for my having turned away from it, and I should have feared a renewed challenge if she hadn't, by good luck, presently gone on: "There's really nothing in him at all!"
