ways affairs of one's own, and I was positively
neglecting mine. Such, for a while, was my foremost reflection; after
which, in their order or out of it, came an inevitable train of others.
One of the first of these was that, frankly, my affairs were by this
time pretty well used to my neglect. There were connections enough in
which it had never failed. A whole cluster of such connections,
effectually displacing the centre of interest, now surrounded me, and I
was--though always but intellectually--drawn into their circle. I did my
best for the rest of the day to turn my back on them, but with the
prompt result of feeling that I meddled with them almost more in
thinking them over in isolation than in hovering personally about them.
Reflection was the real intensity; reflection, as to poor Mrs. Server in
particular, was an indiscreet opening of doors. She became vivid in the
light of the so limited vision of her that I already possessed--try
positively as I would not further to extend it. It was something not to
ask another question, to keep constantly away both from Mrs. Brissenden
and from Ford Obert, whom I had rashly invited to a degree of
participation; it was something to talk as hard as possible with other
persons and on other subjects, to mingle in groups much more superficial
than they supposed themselves, to give ear to broader jokes, to discuss
more tangible mysteries.

The day, as it developed, was large and hot, an unstinted splendour of
summer; excursions, exercise, organised amusement were things admirably
spared us; life became a mere arrested ramble or stimulated lounge, and
we profited to the full by the noble freedom of Newmarch, that
overarching ease which in nothing was so marked as in the tolerance of
talk. The air of the place itself, in such conditions, left one's powers
with a sense of play; if one wanted something to play at one simply
played at being there. I did this myself, with the aid, in especial, of
two or three solitary strolls, unaccompanied dips, of half an hour
a-piece, into outlying parts of the house and the grounds. I must add
that while I resorted to such measures not to see I only fixed what I
_had_ seen, what I did see, the more in my mind. One of these things had
been the way that, at luncheon, Gilbert Long, watching the chance given
him by the loose order in which we moved to it, slipped, to the visible
defeat of somebody else, into the chair of conspicuity beside clever
Lady