e pleasant vague of everything else that didn't matter,) for the
so salient little figure of Mrs. Server, still the controlling image for
me, the real principle of composition, in this affluence of fine things.
What, for my part, while I listened, I most made out was the beauty and
the terror of conditions so highly organised that under their rule her
small lonely fight with disintegration could go on without the betrayal
of a gasp or a shriek, and with no worse tell-tale contortion of lip or
brow than the vibration, on its golden stem, of that constantly renewed
flower of amenity which my observation had so often and so mercilessly
detached only to find again in its place. This flower nodded perceptibly
enough in our deeply stirred air, but there was a peace, none the less,
in feeling the spirit of the wearer to be temporarily at rest. There was
for the time no gentleman on whom she need pounce, no lapse against
which she need guard, no presumption she need create, nor any suspicion
she need destroy. In this pause in her career it came over me that I
should have liked to leave her; it would have prepared for me the
pleasant after-consciousness that I had seen her pass, as I might say,
in music out of sight.

But we were, alas! all too much there, too much tangled and involved for
that; every actor in the play that had so unexpectedly insisted on
constituting itself for me sat forth as with an intimation that they
were not to be so easily disposed of. It was as if there were some last
act to be performed before the curtain could fall. Would the definite
dramatic signal for ringing the curtain down be then only--as a grand
climax and _coup de theatre_--the due attestation that poor Briss had
succumbed to inexorable time and Mrs. Server given way under a cerebral
lesion? Were the rest of us to disperse decorously by the simple action
of the discovery that, on our pianist's striking his last note, with its
consequence of permitted changes of attitude, Gilbert Long's victim had
reached the point of final simplification and Grace Brissenden's the
limit of age recorded of man? I could look at neither of these persons
without a sharper sense of the contrast between the tragedy of their
predicament and the comedy of the situation that did everything for them
but suspect it. They had truly been arrayed and anointed, they had
truly been isolated, for their sacrifice. I was sufficiently aware even
then that if one hadn't known it o