He had made no joke of it, and I had from him no other recognition; it
was therefore a mere touch, yet it gave me a sensible hint that he had
begun, as things were going, to depend upon me, that I already in a
fashion figured to him--and on amazingly little evidence after all--as
his natural protector, his providence, his effective omniscience. Like
Mrs. Server herself, he was materially on my hands, and it was proper I
should "do" for him. I wondered if he were really beginning to look to
me to avert his inexorable fate. Well, if his inexorable fate was to be
an unnameable climax, it had also its special phases, and one of these I
_had_ just averted. I followed him a moment with my eyes, and I then
observed to Lady John that she decidedly took me for too simple a
person. She had meanwhile also watched the direction taken by her
liberated victim, and was the next instant prepared with a reply to my
charge. "Because he has gone to talk with May Server? I don't quite see
what you mean, for I believe him really to be in terror of her. Most of
the men here _are_, you know, and I've really assured myself that he
doesn't find her any less awful than the rest. He finds her the more so
by just the very marked extra attention that you may have noticed she
has given him."

"And does that now happen to be what he has so eagerly gone off to
impress upon her?"

Lady John was so placed that she could continue to look at our friends,
and I made out in her that she was not, in respect to them, without some
slight elements of perplexity. These were even sufficient to make her
temporarily neglect the defence of the breach I had made in her
consistency. "If you mean by 'impressing upon' her speaking to her, he
hasn't gone--you can see for yourself--to impress upon her anything;
they have the most extraordinary way, which I've already observed, of
sitting together without sound. I don't know," she laughed, "what's the
matter with such people!"

"It proves in general," I admitted, "either some coldness or some
warmth, and I quite understand that that's not the way _you_ sit with
your friends. You steer admirably clear of every extravagance. I don't
see, at any rate, why Mrs. Server is a terror----"

But she had already taken me up. "If she doesn't chatter as _I_ do?" She
thought it over. "But she does--to everyone but Mr. Briss. I mean to
every man she can pick up."

I emulated her reflection. "Do they complain of it to you?"

"The