ainter of my state, in this place. It is sufficient that when so much
of the afternoon had waned as to bring signs of the service of tea in
the open air, I knew how far I was gone in pity for her. For I had at
last had to take in what my two interlocutors had given me. Their
impression, coinciding and, as one might say, disinterested, couldn't,
after a little, fail in some degree to impose itself. It had its value.
Mrs. Server _was_ "nervous."

It little mattered to me now that Mrs. Briss had put it to me--that I
had even whimsically put it to myself--that I was perhaps in love with
her. That was as good a name as another for an interest springing up in
an hour, and was moreover a decent working hypothesis. The sentiment had
not indeed asserted itself at "first sight," though it might have taken
its place remarkably well among the phenomena of what is known as
second. The real fact was, none the less, that I was quite too sorry for
her to be anything except sorry. This odd feeling was something that I
may as well say I shall not even now attempt to account for--partly, it
is true, because my recital of the rest of what I was to see in no small
measure does so. It was a force that I at this stage simply found I had
already succumbed to. If it was not the result of what I had granted to
myself was the matter with her, then it was rather the very cause of my
making that concession. It was a different thing from my first prompt
impulse to shield her. I had already shielded her--fought for her so far
as I could or as the case immediately required. My own sense of how I
was affected had practically cleared up, in short, in the presence of
this deeper vision of her. My divinations and inductions had finally
brought home to me that in the whole huge, brilliant, crowded place I
was the only person save one who was in anything that could be called a
relation to her. The other person's relation was concealed, and mine,
so far as she herself was concerned, was unexpressed--so that I suppose
what most, at the juncture in question, stirred within me was the wonder
of how I might successfully express it. I felt that so long as I didn't
express it I should be haunted with the idea of something infinitely
touching and tragic in her loneliness--possibly in her torment, in her
terror. If she was "nervous" to the tune I had come to recognise, it
could only be because she had grounds. And what might her grounds more
naturally be than that, a