at who _she_
was; and nothing could have been sharper than the force with which it
pressed upon me that I had really learnt more than I had bargained for.
Nothing need have happened if I hadn't been so absurdly, so fatally
meditative about poor Long--an accident that most people, wiser people,
appeared on the whole to have steered sufficiently clear of. Compared
with my actual sense, the sense with which I sat there, that other
vision was gross, and grosser still the connection between the two.

Such were some of the reflections in which I indulged while her
eyes--with their strange intermissions of darkness or of light: who
could say which?--told me from time to time that she knew whatever I
was thinking of to be for her virtual advantage. It was prodigious what,
in the way of suppressed communication, passed in these wonderful
minutes between us. Our relation could be at the best but an equal
confession, and I remember saying to myself that if she had been as
subtle as I--which she wasn't!--she too would have put it together that
I had dreadfully talked about her. She would have traced in me my
demonstration to Mrs. Briss that, whoever she was, she must logically
have been idiotised. It was the special poignancy of her collapse that,
so far at least as I was concerned, this was a ravage the extent of
which she had ceased to try to conceal. She had been trying, and more or
less succeeding, all day: the little drama of her public unrest had had,
when one came to consider, no other argument. It had been terror that
had directed her steps; the need constantly to show herself detached and
free, followed by the sterner one not to show herself, by the same
token, limp and empty. This had been the distinct, ferocious logic of
her renewals and ruptures--the anxious mistrust of her wit, the haunting
knowledge of the small distance it would take her at once, the
consequent importance of her exactly timing herself, and the quick
instinct of flight before the menace of discovery. She couldn't let
society alone, because that would have constituted a symptom; yet, for
fear of the appearance of a worse one, she could only mingle in it with
a complex diplomacy. She was accordingly exposed on every side, and to
be with her a while thus quietly was to read back into her behaviour the
whole explanation, which was positively simple to me now. To take up
again the vivid analogy, she had been sailing all day, though scarce
able to keep aflo