er--a
deep quiet something. You and Georgie are getting it. But in a relation
outside marriage you can't get that. You can in those extraordinary
_menages_ in France where the little mistress is so domesticated and
lives with her lover for years, but that would have been as bad to him
as marriage. So I thought it was best to let it all come to an end. It
wasn't easy, for though I had got so that it was torture to be with
him, because all the time I was feeling our dead selves between us, yet
directly I was away I knew that, even though he was the man he was and I
the me I had become, we were still nearer to what had been than anything
else could be. But I did it. It was only when he was dying I went to
Paris to him."

"And that...?"

"Oh, it was quite a success. I don't mean to be brutal, but it was. He
was glad to have me, and showed it.... A deathbed is so terribly
egoistic; it can't be helped, but he forgot himself more than ever
before. I was touched profoundly, but all the time I saw that he was
rising to the occasion without knowing it himself. Not that he was
emotional; he was never that. But he showed me something deeper than he
ever had before. With all his passion he was always so English, always
so much the critic, in spite of his powers of enjoyment. He had always
made love in caresses, never in words. Till this last time, as he was
dying."

Judy was speaking in a quiet voice that sounded as though all her tears
had been shed, yet they were pouring down her face, making havoc of the
paint and powder, of which she was quite aware and for which she cared
not at all. Ishmael thought she had never shown her triumphant
naturalness, her stark candour, more finely. As on that evening when he
had met her in Paradise Lane, he was conscious that they understood each
other almost as well as anyone ever can understand any other human
being, because they were in some respects so alike. Something quiet and
incurably reserved in him--he could never have talked as bravely as she
did--yet was the same as the quality in her that enabled her to bear her
secret relations with Killigrew, that had enabled her to break those
relations off when she thought it best. And now she seemed to have won
through to some calm, he wondered what it was and how she had come to
it....

"What you said about marriage," he said at last, "struck me rather. It's
true. One loses something, but one finds something."

"Marriage, even the most ide