gossip, just where they had left it; even
with the consciousness perhaps of overdoing a little, of putting at its
maximum, for the present harmony, recovery, recapture (what should he
call it?) the pitch and quantity of what the past had held for them.

He didn't in fact, no doubt, dart straight off to Seventh Avenue, there
being too many other old things and much nearer and long subsequent;
the point was only that for everything they spoke of after he had fairly
begun to lean back and stretch his legs, and after she had let him,
above all, light the first of a succession of cigarettes--for everything
they spoke of he positively cultivated extravagance and excess, piling
up the crackling twigs as on the very altar of memory; and that by the
end of half an hour she had lent herself, all gallantly, to their game.
It was the game of feeding the beautiful iridescent flame, ruddy and
green and gold, blue and pink and amber and silver, with anything they
could pick up, anything that would burn and flicker. Thick-strown with
such gleanings the occasion seemed indeed, in spite of the truth that
they perhaps wouldn't have proved, under cross-examination, to have
rubbed shoulders in the other life so very hard. Casual contacts,
qualified communities enough, there had doubtless been, but not
particular "passages," nothing that counted, as he might think of it,
for their "very own" together, for nobody's else at all. These shades of
historic exactitude didn't signify; the more and the less that there
had been made perfect terms--and just by his being there and by her
rejoicing in it--with their present need to have _had_ all their past
could be made to appear to have given them. It was to this tune they
proceeded, the least little bit as if they knowingly pretended--he
giving her the example and setting her the pace of it, and she, poor
dear, after a first inevitable shyness, an uncertainty of wonder, a
breathlessness of courage, falling into step and going whatever length
he would.

She showed herself ready for it, grasping gladly at the perception of
what he must mean; and if she didn't immediately and completely fall
in--not in the first half-hour, not even in the three or four others
that his visit, even whenever he consulted his watch, still made nothing
of--she yet understood enough as soon as she understood that, if their
finer economy hadn't so beautifully served, he might have been conveying
this, that, and the other inco