y're more civil than you," she returned; "for if, when they flee
before it, they bump up against me in their flight, they don't explain
that by intimating that they're come from bad to worse. Besides, I see
what they suffer."

"And do you hear it?"

"What they suffer? No, I've taken care not to suffer myself. I don't
listen. It's none of my business."

"Is that a way of gently expressing," I ventured to ask, "that it's also
none of mine?"

"It might be," she replied, "if I had, as you appear to, the
imagination of atrocity. But I don't pretend to so much as conceive
what's your business."

"I wonder if it isn't just now," I said after a moment, "to convict you
of an attempt at duplicity that has not even had the saving grace of
success! Was it for Brissenden himself that you spoke just now as if you
believed him to wish to cling to you?"

"Well, I'm kind enough for anything," she goodnaturedly enough laughed.
"But what," she asked more sharply, "are you trying to find out?"

Such an awful lot, the answer to this would politely have been, that I
daresay the aptness of the question produced in my face a shade of
embarrassment. I felt, however, the next moment that I needn't fear too
much. What I, on approaching Lady John, had found myself moved to test,
using her in it as a happy touchstone, was the degree of the
surrounding, the latent, sense of things: an impulse confirmed by the
manner in which she had momentarily circled about the phenomenon of Mrs.
Server's avidity, about the mystery of the terms made with it by our
friend. It was present to me that if I could catch, on the part of my
interlocutress, anything of a straight scent, I might take that as the
measure of a diffused danger. I mentally applied this term to the
possibility of diffusion, because I suddenly found myself thinking with
a kind of horror of any accident by which I might have to expose to the
world, to defend against the world, to share with the world, that now so
complex tangle of hypotheses that I have had for convenience to speak of
as my theory. I could toss the ball myself, I could catch it and send it
back, and familiarity had now made this exercise--in my own inner
precincts--easy and safe. But the mere brush of Lady John's clumsier
curiosity made me tremble for the impunity of my creation. If there had
been, so to speak, a discernment, however feeble, of _my_ discernment,
it would have been irresistible to me to take this as the mena