es that struck me as betraying--and the
appeal of it went to the heart--the constant dread that if entangled in
talk she might show confusion. Nevertheless she brought out after a
moment, as naturally and charmingly as possible: "How can that be when
he's so strikingly in love with his wife?"

I gave her the benefit of the most apparent consideration. "Strikingly,
you call it?"

"Why, I thought it was noticed--what he does for her."

"Well, of course she's extremely handsome--or at least extremely fresh
and attractive. He _is_ in love with her, no doubt, if you take it by
the quarter, or by the year, like a yacht or a stable," I pushed on at
random. "But isn't there such a state also as being in love by the day?"

She waited, and I guessed from the manner of it exactly why. It was the
most obscure of intimations that she would have liked better that I
shouldn't make her talk; but obscurity, by this time, offered me no more
difficulties. The hint, none the less, a trifle disconcerted me, and,
while I vaguely sought for some small provisional middle way between
going and not going on, the oddest thing, as a fruit of my own delay,
occurred. This was neither more nor less than the revival of her
terrible little fixed smile. It came back as if with an audible
click--as a gas-burner makes a pop when you light it. It told me visibly
that from the moment she must talk she could talk only with its aid. The
effect of its aid I indeed immediately perceived.

"How do I know?" she asked in answer to my question. "I've never _been_
in love."

"Not even by the day?"

"Oh, a day's surely a long time."

"It is," I returned. "But I've none the less, more fortunately than you,
been in love for a whole one." Then I continued, from an impulse of
which I had just become conscious and that was clearly the result of the
heart-breaking facial contortion--heart-breaking, that is, when one knew
what I knew--by which she imagined herself to represent the pleasant
give-and-take of society. This sense, for me, was a quick horror of
forcing her, in such conditions, to talk at all. Poor Briss had
mentioned to me, as an incident of his contact with her, his
apprehension of her breaking down; and now, at a touch, I saw what he
had meant. She _would_ break down if I didn't look out. I found myself
thus, from one minute to the other, as greatly dreading it for her,
dreading it indeed for both of us, as I might have dreaded some physical
accident