should it be vivid,
why stirring, why a picture at all? Was _any_ temporary collocation, in
a house so encouraging to sociability, out of the range of nature?
Intensely prompt, I need scarcely say, were both my freshness and my
perceived objections to it. The happiest objection, could I have taken
time to phrase it, would doubtless have been that the particular effect
of this juxtaposition--to my eyes at least--was a thing not to have been
foreseen. The parties to it looked, certainly, as I felt that I hadn't
prefigured them; though even this, for my reason, was not a description
of their aspect. Much less was it a description for the intelligence of
Lady John--to whom, however, after all, some formulation of what she
dimly saw would not be so indispensable.

We briefly watched, at any rate, together, and as our eyes met again we
moreover confessed that we had watched. And we could ostensibly have
offered each other no explanation of that impulse save that we had been
talking of those concerned as separate and that it was in consequence a
little odd to find ourselves suddenly seeing them as one. For that was
it--they _were_ as one; as one, at all events, for _my_ large reading.
My large reading had meanwhile, for the convenience of the rest of my
little talk with Lady John, to make itself as small as possible. I had
an odd sense, till we fell apart again, as of keeping my finger rather
stiffly fixed on a passage in a favourite author on which I had not
previously lighted. I held the book out of sight and behind me; I spoke
of things that were not at all in it--or not at all on that particular
page; but my volume, none the less, was only waiting. What might be
written there hummed already in my ears as a result of my mere glimpse.
Had _they_ also wonderfully begun to know? Had _she_, most wonderfully,
and had they, in that case, prodigiously come together on it? This was a
possibility into which my imagination could dip even deeper than into
the depths over which it had conceived the other pair as hovering. These
opposed couples balanced like bronze groups at the two ends of a
chimney-piece, and the most I could say to myself in lucid deprecation
of my thought was that I mustn't take them equally for granted merely
_because_ they balanced. Things in the real had a way of not balancing;
it was all an affair, this fine symmetry, of artificial proportion. Yet
even while I kept my eyes away from Mrs. Briss and Long it was vi