told of.

"What is it?" he asked.

Very gently she released her hand, and as she did so she looked on it
almost sternly.

"Why?" she said. "Do I look unhappy--or what? Sit down, Seymour dear."

She seemed to add the last word with a sort of pressure, with almost
self-conscious intention.

He drew the tails of his braided morning coat forward with both hands
and sat down, and she thought, "How differently a young man sits down!"

"Unhappy!" he said, in his quiet and strong, rather deep voice.

He looked at her with the scrutinizing eyes of affection, whose gaze
sometimes is so difficult to bear. And she felt that something within
her was writhing under his eyes.

"I don't think you often look happy, Adela. No; it isn't that. But you
look to-day as if you had been going through something which had tried
your nerves--some crisis."

He paused. She remained silent and looked at his hands and then at his
eyelids and eyebrows. And there was a terrible coldness in her scrutiny,
which she did not show to him, but of which she was painfully aware.
His nails were not flat, but were noticeably curved. For a moment the
thought in her mind was simply, "Could I live with those nails?"
She hated herself for that thought; she despised herself for it; she
considered herself almost inhuman and certainly despicable, and she
recalled swiftly what Seymour was, the essential beauty and fineness
of his character, his truth, his touching faithfulness. And almost
simultaneously she thought, "Why do old men get those terribly bushy
eyebrows, like thickets?"

"Perhaps I think too much," she said. "Living alone, one thinks--and
thinks. You have so much to do and I so little."

"Sometimes I think of retiring," he said.

"From the court?"

"Yes."

"Oh, but they would never let you!"

"My place could be filled easily enough."

"Oh, no, it couldn't."

And she added, leaning forward now, and looking at him differently:

"Don't you ever realize how rare you are, Seymour? There is scarcely
anyone left like you, and yet you are not old-fashioned. Do you know
that I have never yet met a man who really was a man--"

"Now, now, Adela!"

"No, I will say it! I have never met a real man who, knowing you, didn't
think you were rare. They wouldn't let you go. Besides, what would you
retire to?"

Again she looked at him with a scrutiny which she felt to be morally
cruel. She could not refrain from it just then. It seemed to come
inevit