nner by which she harmonized herself with her surroundings, it flashed
on him that, to need such adroit handling, the situation must indeed be
desperate. She was on the edge of something--that was the impression left
with him. He seemed to see her poised on the brink of a chasm, with one
graceful foot advanced to assert her unconsciousness that the ground was
failing her.

On the Promenade des Anglais, where Ned Silverton hung on him for the
half hour before dinner, he received a deeper impression of the general
insecurity. Silverton was in a mood of Titanic pessimism. How any one
could come to such a damned hole as the Riviera--any one with a grain of
imagination--with the whole Mediterranean to choose from: but then, if
one's estimate of a place depended on the way they broiled a spring
chicken! Gad! what a study might be made of the tyranny of the
stomach--the way a sluggish liver or insufficient gastric juices might
affect the whole course of the universe, overshadow everything in
reach--chronic dyspepsia ought to be among the "statutory causes"; a
woman's life might be ruined by a man's inability to digest fresh bread.
Grotesque? Yes--and tragic--like most absurdities. There's nothing
grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.... Where was he?
Oh--the reason they chucked Sicily and rushed back? Well--partly, no
doubt, Miss Bart's desire to get back to bridge and smartness. Dead as a
stone to art and poetry--the light never WAS on sea or land for her! And
of course she persuaded Dorset that the Italian food was bad for him. Oh,
she could make him believe anything--ANYTHING! Mrs. Dorset was aware of
it--oh, perfectly: nothing SHE didn't see! But she could hold her
tongue--she'd had to, often enough. Miss Bart was an intimate friend--she
wouldn't hear a word against her. Only it hurts a woman's pride--there
are some things one doesn't get used to . . . All this in confidence, of
course? Ah--and there were the ladies signalling from the balcony of the
hotel.... He plunged across the Promenade, leaving Selden to a meditative
cigar.

The conclusions it led him to were fortified, later in the evening, by
some of those faint corroborative hints that generate a light of their
own in the dusk of a doubting mind. Selden, stumbling on a chance
acquaintance, had dined with him, and adjourned, still in his company, to
the brightly lit Promenade, where a line of crowded stands commanded the
glittering darkness of the wa