felt a glow--also, I feared, too visible--as soon as I had seen
whom he meant. His meaning Lady John did me somehow so much good that I
believed it would have done me still more to hear him call her a
harridan or a Jezebel. It was none of my business; how little was
anything, when it came to that, my business!--yet indefinably,
unutterably, I felt assuaged for him and comforted. I verily believe it
hung in the balance a minute or two that in my impulse to draw him out,
so that I might give him my sympathy, I was prepared to risk overturning
the edifice of my precautions. I luckily, as it happened, did nothing of
the sort; I contrived to breathe consolingly on his secret without
betraying an intention. There was almost no one in the place save two or
three of the very youngest women whom he wouldn't have had a right to
call old. Lady John was a hag, then; Mrs. Server herself was more than
on the turn; Gilbert Long was fat and forty; and I cast about for some
light in which I could show that I--_a plus forte raison_--was a
pantaloon. "Of course you can't quite see the fun of it, and it really
isn't fair to you. You struck me as much more in your element," I
ventured to add, "when, this morning, more than once, I chanced to
observe you led captive by Mrs. Server."

"Oh, that's a different affair," he answered with an accent that
promised a growth of confidence.

"Mrs. Server's an old woman," I continued, "but she can't seem to a
fellow like you as old as Lady John. She has at any rate more charm;
though perhaps not," I added, "quite so much talk."

On this he said an extraordinary thing, which all but made me start
again. "Oh, she hasn't any _talk_!"

I took, as quickly as possible, refuge in a surprised demurrer. "Not
_any_?"

"None to speak of."

I let all my wonder come. "But wasn't she chattering to you at
luncheon?" It forced him to meet my eyes at greater length, and I could
already see that my experiment--for insidiously and pardonably such I
wished to make it--was on the way to succeed. I had been right then, and
I knew where I stood. He couldn't have been "drawn" on his wife, and he
couldn't have been drawn, in the least directly, on himself, but as he
could thus easily be on Lady John, so likewise he could on other women,
or on the particular one, at least, who mattered to me. I felt I really
knew what I was about, for to draw him on Mrs. Server was in truth to
draw him indirectly on himself. It was indeed