brace Dawling, whose first emotion on beholding me had
visibly and ever so oddly been a consciousness of guilt. I had caught
him somehow in the act, though that was as yet all I knew; but by the
time we sank noiselessly into our chairs again--for the music was
supreme, Wagner passed first--my demonstration ought pretty well to have
given him the limit of the criticism he had to fear. I myself indeed,
while the opera blazed, was only too afraid he might divine in our silent
closeness the very moral of my optimism, which was simply the comfort I
had gathered from seeing that if our companion's beauty lived again her
vanity partook of its life. I had hit on the right note--that was what
eased me off: it drew all pain for the next half-hour from the sense of
the deep darkness in which the stricken woman sat. If the music, in that
darkness, happily soared and swelled for her, it beat its wings in unison
with those of a gratified passion. A great deal came and went between us
without profaning the occasion, so that I could feel at the end of twenty
minutes as if I knew almost everything he might in kindness have to tell
me; knew even why Flora, while I stared at her from the stalls, had
misled me by the use of ivory and crystal and by appearing to recognise
me and smile. She leaned back in her chair in luxurious ease: I had from
the first become aware that the way she fingered her pearls was a sharp
image of the wedded state. Nothing of old had seemed wanting to her
assurance, but I hadn't then dreamed of the art with which she would wear
that assurance as a married woman. She had taken him when everything had
failed; he had taken her when she herself had done so. His embarrassed
eyes confessed it all, confessed the deep peace he found in it. They
only didn't tell me why he had not written to me, nor clear up as yet a
minor obscurity. Flora after a while again lifted the glass from the
ledge of the box and elegantly swept the house with it. Then, by the
mere instinct of her grace, a motion but half conscious, she inclined her
head into the void with the sketch of a salute, producing, I could see, a
perfect imitation of response to some homage. Dawling and I looked at
each other again; the tears came into his eyes. She was playing at
perfection still, and her misfortune only simplified the process.

I recognised that this was as near as I should ever come, certainly as I
should come that night, to pressing on her m