een difference
peep out at me, and I had seen the impression of it confirmed by what
had afterwards happened. It had been in her way of turning from me after
that brief passage; it had been in her going up to bed without seeing me
again; it had been once more in her thinking, for reasons of her own,
better of that; and it had been most of all in her sending her husband
down to me. Well, wouldn't it finally be, still more than most of
all----? But I scarce had known, at this point, what grossness or what
fineness of material correspondence to forecast. I only had waited there
with these general symptoms so present that almost any further
development of them occurred to me as conceivable. So much as this was
true, but I was after a moment to become aware of something by which I
was as strongly affected as if I had been quite unprepared. Yes,
literally, that final note, in the smoking-room, the note struck in
Obert's ejaculation on poor Briss's hundred years, had failed to achieve
for me a worthy implication. I was forced, after looking at Grace
Brissenden a minute, to recognise that my imagination had not risen to
its opportunity. The full impression took a minute--a minute during
which she said nothing; then it left me deeply and above all, as I felt,
discernibly conscious of the prodigious thing, _the_ thing, I had not
thought of. This it was that gave her such a beautiful chance not to
speak: she was so quite sufficiently occupied with seeing what I hadn't
thought of, and with seeing me, to make up for lost time, breathlessly
think of it while she watched me.

All I had at first taken in was, as I say, her untouched splendour; I
don't know why that should have impressed me--as if it had been probable
she would have appeared in her dressing-gown; it was the only thing to
have expected. And it in fact plumed and enhanced her assurance,
sustained her propriety, lent our belated interview the natural and
casual note. But there was another service it still more rendered her:
it so covered, at the first blush, the real message of her aspect, that
she enjoyed the luxury--and I felt her enjoy it--of seeing my perception
in arrest. Amazing, when I think of it, the number of things that
occurred in these stayed seconds of our silence; but they are perhaps
best represented by the two most marked intensities of my own sensation:
the first the certitude that she had at no moment since her marriage so
triumphantly asserted her defea