supervision as
made me morally responsible, so to speak, for her, and thereby
intensified my scruples. Well, my scruples had the last word--they were
what determined me to look at my watch and profess that, whatever sense
of a margin Brissenden and Mrs. Server might still enjoy, it behoved me
not to forget that I took, on such great occasions, an hour to dress for
dinner. It was a fairly crude cover for my retreat; perhaps indeed I
should rather say that my retreat was practically naked and unadorned.
It formulated their relation. I left them with the formula on their
hands, both queerly staring at it, both uncertain what to do with it.
For some passage that would soon be a correction of this, however, one
might surely feel that one could trust them. I seemed to feel my trust
justified, behind my back, before I had got twenty yards away. By the
time I had done this, I must add, something further had befallen me.
Poor Briss had met my eyes just previous to my flight, and it was then I
satisfied myself of what had happened to him at the house. He had met
his wife; she had in some way dealt with him; he had been with her,
however briefly, alone; and the intimacy of their union had been afresh
impressed upon him. Poor Briss, in fine, looked ten years older.

IX

I shall never forget the impressions of that evening, nor the way, in
particular, the immediate effect of some of them was to merge the light
of my extravagant perceptions in a glamour much more diffused. I
remember feeling seriously warned, while dinner lasted, not to yield
further to my idle habit of reading into mere human things an interest
so much deeper than mere human things were in general prepared to
supply. This especial hour, at Newmarch, had always a splendour that
asked little of interpretation, that even carried itself, with an
amiable arrogance, as indifferent to what the imagination could do for
it. I think the imagination, in those halls of art and fortune, was
almost inevitably accounted a poor matter; the whole place and its
participants abounded so in pleasantness and picture, in all the
felicities, for every sense, taken for granted there by the very basis
of life, that even the sense most finely poetic, aspiring to extract the
moral, could scarce have helped feeling itself treated to something of
the snub that affects--when it does affect--the uninvited reporter in
whose face a door is closed. I said to myself during dinner that these