come. But you must feel about it as you can," she
wound up--"till you get used to the idea."

She spoke so for accommodation, for discretion, for some ulterior view
already expressed in her manner, that, after taking well in, from behind
his hands, that this was her very voice--oh ladylike!--heard, and heard
in deprecation of displeasure, after long years again, he uncovered his
face and freshly met her eyes. More than ever he couldn't have known
her. Less and less remained of the figure all the facts of which had
long ago so hardened for him. She was a handsome, grave, authoritative,
but refined and, as it were, physically rearranged person--she, the
outrageous vulgarity of whose prime assault had kept him shuddering so
long as a shudder was in him. That atrocity in her was what everything
had been built on, but somehow, all strangely, it was slipping from him;
so that, after the oddest fashion conceivable, when he felt he mustn't
let her go, it was as if he were putting out his hand to save the past,
the hideous real unalterable past, exactly as she had been the cause of
its being and the cause of his undergoing it. He should have been too
awfully "sold" if he wasn't going to have been right about her.

"I don't mind," he heard himself at last say. Not to mind had seemed for
the instant the length he was prepared to go; but he was afterward aware
of how soon he must have added: "You've come on purpose to see me?" He
was on the point of putting to her further: "What then do you want of
me?" But he would keep--yes, in time--from appearing to show he cared.
If he showed he cared, where then would be his revenge? So he was
already, within five minutes, thinking his revenge uncomfortably over
instead of just comfortably knowing it. What came to him, at any
rate, as they actually fell to talk, was that, with such precautions,
considerations, reduplications of consciousness, almost avowed feelings
of her way on her own part, and light fingerings of his chords of
sensibility, she was understanding, she _had_ understood, more things
than all the years, up to this strange eventide, had given him an
inkling of. They talked, they went on--he hadn't let her retreat, to
whatever it committed him and however abjectly it did so; yet keeping
off and off, dealing with such surface facts as involved ancient
acquaintance but held abominations at bay. The recognition, the
attestation that she _had_ come down for him, that there would be