liberately, as on the clear show of the clock-face
of their situation, to make. The whole demonstration, none the less,
presented itself as taking place at a very high level of debate--in the
cool upper air of the finer discrimination, the deeper sincerity, the
larger philosophy. No matter what were the facts invoked and arrayed,
it was only a question, as yet, of their seeing their way together: to
which indeed, exactly, the present occasion appeared to have so much to
contribute. "It's not that you haven't my courage," Charlotte said,
"but that you haven't, I rather think, my imagination. Unless indeed
it should turn out after all," she added, "that you haven't even my
intelligence. However, I shall not be afraid of that till you've given
me more proof." And she made again, but more clearly, her point of a
moment before. "You knew, besides, you knew to-day, I would come. And
if you knew that you know everything." So she pursued, and if he didn't
meanwhile, if he didn't even at this, take her up, it might be that she
was so positively fitting him again with the fair face of temporising
kindness that he had given her, to keep her eyes on, at the other
important juncture, and the sense of which she might ever since have
been carrying about with her like a precious medal--not exactly blessed
by the Pope suspended round her neck. She had come back, however this
might be, to her immediate account of herself, and no mention of their
great previous passage was to rise to the lips of either. "Above all,"
she said, "there has been the personal romance of it."

"Of tea with me over the fire? Ah, so far as that goes I don't think
even my intelligence fails me."

"Oh, it's further than that goes; and if I've had a better day than you
it's perhaps, when I come to think of it, that I AM braver. You bore
yourself, you see. But I don't. I don't, I don't," she repeated.

"It's precisely boring one's self without relief," he protested, "that
takes courage."

"Passive then--not active. My romance is that, if you want to know, I've
been all day on the town. Literally on the town--isn't that what they
call it? I know how it feels." After which, as if breaking off, "And
you, have you never been out?" she asked.

He still stood there with his hands in his pockets. "What should I have
gone out for?"

"Oh, what should people in our case do anything for? But you're
wonderful, all of YOU--you know how to live. We're clumsy brutes, we
othe