had happened to be predominantly a part of that charm;
while such were our immediate conditions I wondered of course if he had
not, just as consciously and essentially as I, quite another business
in mind. It was not indeed that our allusion to the other business would
not have been wholly undiscoverable by a third person.

So far as it took place it was of a "subtlety," as we used to say at
Newmarch, in relation to which the common register of that pressure
would have been, I fear, too old-fashioned a barometer. I had moreover
the comfort--for it amounted to that--of perceiving after a little that
we understood each other too well for our understanding really to have
tolerated the interference of passion, such passion as would have been
represented on his side by resentment of my intelligence and on my side
by resentment of his. The high sport of such intelligence--between
gentlemen, to the senses of any other than whom it must surely be
closed--demanded and implied in its own intimate interest a certain
amenity. Yes, accordingly, I had promptly got the answer that my wonder
at his approach required: he had come to me for the high sport. He would
formerly have been incapable of it, and he was beautifully capable of it
now. It was precisely the kind of high sport--the play of perception,
expression, sociability--in which Mrs. Server would a year or two before
have borne as light a hand. I need scarcely add how little it would have
found itself in that lady's present chords. He had said to me in our ten
minutes everything amusing she couldn't have said. Yet if when our host
gave us the sign to adjourn to the drawing-room so much as all this had
grown so much clearer, I had still, figuratively speaking, a small nut
or two left to crack. By the time we moved away together, however, these
resistances had yielded. The answers had really only been waiting for
the questions. The play of Long's mind struck me as more marked, since
the morning, by the same amount, as it might have been called, as the
march of poor Briss's age; and if I had, a while before, in the wood,
had my explanation of this latter addition, so I had it now of the
former--as to which I shall presently give it.

When music, in English society, as we know, is not an accompaniment to
the voice, the voice can in general be counted on to assert its pleasant
identity as an accompaniment to music; but at Newmarch we had been
considerably schooled, and this evening