ir having, on the whole
scene, found pleasure further poisoned by the frequency in all those
parts of "evil faces: oh the evil faces!" _That_ recorded source of
suffering enormously affected me--I felt it as beautifully
characteristic: I had never heard an _impression de voyage_ so little
tainted with the superficial or the vulgar. I was myself at the time in
the thick of impressions, and it was true that they would have seemed to
me rather to fail of life, of their own doubtless inferior kind, if
submitting beyond a certain point to be touched with that sad or, as who
should say, that grey colour: Mrs. Lewes's were, it appeared,
predominantly so touched, and I could at once admire it in them and
wonder if they didn't pay for this by some lack of intensity on other
sides. Why I didn't more impute to her, or to them, that possible lack
is more than I can say, since under the law of moral earnestness the
vulgar and the trivial would be then involved in the poor observations
of my own making--a conclusion sufficiently depressing.

However, I didn't find myself depressed, and I didn't find the great
mind that was so good as to shine upon us at that awkward moment however
dimly anything but augmented; what was its sensibility to the evil faces
but part of the large old tenderness which the occasion had caused to
overflow and on which we were presently floated back into the room she
had left?--where we might perhaps beguile a little the impatience of the
sufferer waiting for relief. We ventured in our flutter to doubt whether
we _should_ beguile, we held back with a certain delicacy from this
irruption, and if there was a momentary wonderful and beautiful conflict
I remember how our yielding struck me as crowned with the finest grace
it could possibly have, that of the prodigious privilege of humouring,
yes literally humouring so renowned a spirit at a moment when we could
really match our judgment with hers. For the injured young man, in the
other and the larger room, simply lay stretched on his back on the
floor, the posture apparently least painful to him--though painful
enough at the best I easily saw on kneeling beside him, after my first
dismay, to ask if I could in any way ease him. I see his face again,
fair and young and flushed, with its vague little smile and its moist
brow; I recover the moment or two during which we sought to make natural
conversation in his presence, and my question as to what conversation
_was_