John. A second was that Mrs. Server then occupied a place as remote
as possible from this couple, but not from Guy Brissenden, who had found
means to seat himself next her while my notice was engaged by the
others. What I was at the same time supremely struck with could
doubtless only be Mrs. Server's bright ubiquity, as it had at last come
to seem to me, and that of the companions she had recruited for the
occasion. Attended constantly by a different gentleman, she was in the
range of my vision wherever I turned--she kept repeating her picture in
settings separated by such intervals that I wondered at the celerity
with which she proceeded from spot to spot. She was never discernibly
out of breath, though the associate of her ecstasy at the given moment
might have been taken as being; and I kept getting afresh the impression
which, the day before, had so promptly followed my arrival, the odd
impression, as of something the matter with each party, that I had
gathered, in the grounds, from the sight of her advance upon me with
Obert. I had by this time of course made out--and it was absurd to shut
my eyes to it--what _that_ particular something, at least, was. It was
that Obert had quickly perceived something to be the matter with _her_,
and that she, on her side, had become aware of his discovery.

I wondered hereupon if the discovery were inevitable for each gentleman
in succession, and if this were their reason for changing so often. Did
everyone leave her, like Obert, with an uneasy impression of her, and
were these impressions now passed about with private hilarity or
profundity, though without having reached me save from the source I have
named? I affected myself as constantly catching her eye, as if she
wished to call my attention to the fact of who was with her and who was
not. I had kept my distance since our episode with the pastels, and yet
nothing could more come home to me than that I had really not, since
then, been absent from her. We met without talk, but not, thanks to
these pointed looks, without contact. I daresay that, for that matter,
my cogitations--for I must have bristled with them--would have made me
as stiff a puzzle to interpretative minds as I had suffered other
phenomena to become to my own. I daresay I wandered with a tell-tale
restlessness of which the practical detachment might well have mystified
those who hadn't suspicions. Whenever I caught Mrs. Server's eye it was
really to wonder how ma