always so much to the point as the two things I've repeated to
you."

Their weight then suggested that I should have them over again. "His
revelation, in the first place, of Long and Lady John?"

"And his revelation in the second"--she spoke of it as a broad joke--"of
May Server and himself."

There was something in her joke that was a chill to my mind; but I
nevertheless played up. "And what does he say that's further interesting
about _that_?"

"Why, that she's awfully sharp."

I gasped--she turned it out so. "_She_--Mrs. Server?"

It made her, however, equally stare. "Why, isn't it the very thing you
maintained?"

I felt her dreadful logic, but I couldn't--with my exquisite image all
contrasted, as in a flash from flint, with this monstrosity--so much as
entertain her question. I could only stupidly again sound it. "Awfully
sharp?"

"You after all then now don't?" It was she herself whom the words at
present described! "Then what on earth _do_ you think?" The strange
mixture in my face naturally made her ask it, but everything, within a
minute, had somehow so given way under the touch of her supreme
assurance, the presentation of her own now finished system, that I dare
say I couldn't at the moment have in the least trusted myself to tell
her. She left me, however, in fact, small time--she only took enough,
with her negations arrayed and her insolence recaptured, to judge me
afresh, which she did as she gathered herself up into the strength of
twenty-five. I didn't after all--it appeared part of my smash--know the
weight of her husband's years, but I knew the weight of my own. They
might have been a thousand, and nothing but the sense of them would in a
moment, I saw, be left me. "My poor dear, you _are_ crazy, and I bid you
good-night!"

Nothing but the sense of them--on my taking it from her without a sound
and watching her, through the lighted rooms, retreat and
disappear--_was_ at first left me; but after a minute something else
came, and I grew conscious that her verdict lingered. She had so had the
last word that, to get out of its planted presence, I shook myself, as I
had done before, from my thought. When once I had started to my room
indeed--and to preparation for a livelier start as soon as the house
should stir again--I almost breathlessly hurried. Such a last word--the
word that put me altogether nowhere--was too unacceptable not to
prescribe afresh that prompt test of escape to other air for