ow I remember saying to myself that
if she didn't get better she surely _must_ get worse!--being aware that
I referred on the one side to her occult surrender and on the other to
its awful penalty. It became present to me that she possibly might
recover if anything should happen that would pull her up, turn her into
some other channel. If, however, that consideration didn't detain me
longer the fact may stand as a sign of how little I believed in any
check. Gilbert Long might die, but not the intensity he had inspired.
The analogy with the situation of the Brissendens here, I further
considered, broke down; I at any rate rather positively welcomed the
view that the sacrificed party to _that_ union might really find the
arrest of his decline, if not the renewal of his youth, in the loss of
his wife. Would this lady indeed, as an effect of _his_ death, begin to
wrinkle and shrivel? It would sound brutal to say that this was what I
should have preferred to hold, were it not that I in fact felt forced to
recognise the slightness of such a chance. She would have loved his
youth, and have made it her own, in death as in life, and he would have
quitted the world, in truth, only the more effectually to leave it to
her. Mrs. Server's quandary--which was now all I cared for--was exactly
in her own certitude of every absence of issue. But I need give little
more evidence of how it had set me thinking.

As much as anything else, perhaps, it was the fear of what one of the
men might say to me that made me for an hour or two, at this crisis,
continuously shy. Nobody, doubtless, would have said anything worse than
that she was more of a flirt than ever, that they had all compared notes
and would accordingly be interested in some hint of another, possibly a
deeper, experience. It would have been almost as embarrassing to have to
tell them how little experience I had had in fact as to have had to tell
them how much I had had in fancy--all the more that I had as yet only my
thin idea of the line of feeling in her that had led her so to spare me.
Tea on the terraces represented, meanwhile, among us, so much neglect of
everything else that my meditations remained for some time as unobserved
as I could desire. I was not, moreover, heeding much where they carried
me, and became aware of what I owed them only on at last finding myself
anticipated as the occupant of an arbour into which I had strolled. Then
I saw I had reached a remote part of