"he deals--turned out as we
now see him--at another establishment."

"I'll grant it," said Mrs. Brissenden, "if you'll only name me the
place."

Ah, I could still but laugh and resume! "He doesn't screen Lady
John--she doesn't screen herself--with your husband or with anybody.
It's she who's herself the screen! And pleased as she is at being so
clever, and at being thought so, she doesn't even know it. She doesn't
so much as suspect it. She's an unmitigated fool about it. 'Of course
Mr. Long's clever, because he's in love with me and sits at my feet, and
don't you see how clever _I_ am? Don't you hear what good things I
say--wait a little, I'm going to say another in about three minutes; and
how, if you'll only give him time too, he comes out with them after me?
They don't perhaps sound so good, but you see where he has got them. I'm
so brilliant, in fine, that the men who admire me have only to imitate
me, which, you observe, they strikingly do.' Something like that is all
her philosophy."

My friend turned it over. "You do sound like her, you know. Yet how, if
a woman's stupid----"

"Can she have made a man clever? She can't. She can't at least have
begun it. What we shall know the real person by, in the case that you
and I are studying, is that the man himself will have made her what she
has become. She will have done just what Lady John has not done--she
will have put up the shutters and closed the shop. She will have parted,
for her friend, with her wit."

"So that she may be regarded as reduced to idiocy?"

"Well--so I can only see it."

"And that if we look, therefore, for the right idiot----"

"We shall find the right woman--our friend's mystic Egeria? Yes, we
shall be at least approaching the truth. We shall 'burn,' as they say in
hide-and-seek." I of course kept to the point that the idiot would have
to _be_ the right one. _Any_ idiot wouldn't be to the purpose. If it was
enough that a woman was a fool the search might become hopeless even in
a house that would have passed but ill for a fool's paradise. We were on
one of the shaded terraces, to which, here and there, a tall window
stood open. The picture without was all morning and August, and within
all clear dimness and rich gleams. We stopped once or twice, raking the
gloom for lights, and it was at some such moment that Mrs. Brissenden
asked me if I then regarded Gilbert Long as now exalted to the position
of the most brilliant of our companions.