overably divided between her prudence and
her vanity, for if it was difficult to make poor Briss figure at all
vividly as an insistent satellite, the thankless tact she had to employ
gave her exactly, she argued, the right to be refreshingly fanned with
an occasional flap of the flag under which she had, as she ridiculously
fancied, truly conquered. If she was where I found her because her
escort had dragged her there, she had made the best of it through the
hope of assistance from another quarter. She had held out on the
possibility that Mr. Long--whom one _could_ without absurdity sit in an
arbour with--might have had some happy divination of her plight. He had
had such divinations before--thanks to a condition in him that made
sensibility abnormal--and the least a wretched woman could do when
betrayed by the excess of nature's bounty was to play admirer against
admirer and be "talked about" on her own terms. She would just this once
have admitted it, I was to gather, to be an occasion for pleading
guilty--oh, so harmlessly!--to a consciousness of the gentleman mutely
named between us. Well, the "proof" I just alluded to was that I had not
sat with my friends five minutes before Gilbert Long turned up.

I saw in a moment how neatly my being there with them played _his_ game;
I became in this fashion a witness for him that he could almost as
little leave Lady John alone as--well, as other people could. It may
perfectly have been the pleasure of this reflection that again made him
free and gay--produced in him, in any case, a different shade of manner
from that with which, before luncheon, as the consequence perhaps of a
vague _flair_ for my possible penetration, I had suspected him of edging
away from me. Not since my encounter with him at Paddington the
afternoon before had I had so to recognise him as the transfigured
talker. To see Lady John with him was to have little enough doubt of
_her_ recognitions, just as this spectacle also dotted each "i" in my
conviction of his venial--I can only call it that--duplicity. I made up
my mind on the spot that it had been no part of his plan to practise on
her, and that the worst he could have been accused of was a good-natured
acceptance, more apparent than real, for his own purposes, of her
theory--which she from time to time let peep out--that they would have
liked each other better if they hadn't been each, alas! so good. He
profited by the happy accident of having pleased a