h. "Is it your idea to pretend to me that I'm keeping Grace
Brissenden awake?" There was consistency enough in her wonder. "She has
not been anything but nice to me; she's not a person whose path one
crosses without finding it out; and I can't imagine what has got into
her if any such grievance as that is what she has been pouring out to
you in your apparently so deep confabulations."

This toss of the ball was one that, I saw quickly enough, even a taste
for sport wouldn't justify my answering, and my logical interest lay
moreover elsewhere. "Dear no! Mrs. Brissenden certainly feels her
strength, and I should never presume to take under my charge any
personal situation of hers. I had in my mind a very different identity."

Lady John, as if to be patient with me, looked about at our companions
for a hint of it, wondering which of the ladies I might have been
supposed to "care for" so much as to tolerate in her a preference for a
rival; but the effect of this survey was, I the next instant observed, a
drop of her attention from what I had been saying. Her eye had been
caught by the sight of Gilbert Long within range of us, and then had
been just visibly held by the fact that the person seated with him on
one of the small sofas that almost of necessity made conversation
intimate was the person whose name, just uttered between us, was, in
default of the name she was in search of, still in the air. Gilbert Long
and Mrs. Briss were in familiar colloquy--though I was aware, at the
first flush, of nothing in this that should have made my interlocutress
stare. That is I was aware of nothing but that I had simultaneously
myself been moved to some increase of sharpness. What _could_ I have
known that should have caused me to wonder at the momentary existence of
this particular conjunction of minds unless it were simply the fact that
I hadn't seen it occur amid the many conjunctions I had already
noticed--_plus_ the fact that I had a few minutes before, in the
interest of the full roundness of my theory, actually been missing it?
These two persons had met in my presence at Paddington and had travelled
together under my eyes; I had talked of Mrs. Briss with Long and of Long
with Mrs. Briss; but the vivid picture that their social union forthwith
presented stirred within me, though so strangely late in the day, it
might have seemed, for such an emotion, more than enough freshness of
impression. Yet--now that I did have it there--why