rranged and arrayed, disguised and decorated,
pursuing in vain, through our careless company, her search for the right
shade of apparent security, she felt herself none the less all the while
the restless victim of fear and failure?

Once my imagination had seen her in this light the touches it could add
to the picture might be trusted to be telling. Further observation was
to convince me of their truth, but while I waited for it with my
apprehension that it would come in spite of me I easily multiplied and
lavished them. I made out above all what she would most be trying to
hide. It was not, so to speak, the guarded primary fact--it could only
be, wretched woman, that produced, that disastrous, treacherous
consequence of the fact which her faculties would exhibit, and most of
all the snapped cord of her faculty of talk. Guy Brissenden had, at the
worst, his compromised face and figure to show and to shroud--if he
were really, that is, as much aware of them as one had suspected. She
had her whole compromised machinery of thought and speech, and if these
signs were not, like his, external, that made her case but the harder,
for she had to create, with intelligence rapidly ebbing, with wit half
gone, the illusion of an unimpaired estate. She was like some unhappy
lady robbed of her best jewels--obliged so to dispose and distribute the
minor trinkets that had escaped as still to give the impression of a
rich _ecrin_. Was not that embarrassment, if one analysed a little, at
the bottom of her having been all day, in the vulgar phrase and as the
three of us had too cruelly noted, all over the place? _Was_ indeed, for
that matter, this observation confined to us, or had it at last been
irrepressibly determined on the part of the company at large? This was a
question, I hasten to add, that I would not now for the world have put
to the test. I felt I should have known how to escape had any rumour of
wonder at Mrs. Server's ways been finally conveyed to me. I might from
this moment have, as much as I liked, my own sense of it, but I was
definitely conscious of a sort of loyalty to her that would have
rendered me blank before others: though not indeed that--oh, at last,
quite the contrary!--it would have forbidden me to watch and watch. I
positively dreaded the accident of my being asked by one of the men if I
knew how everyone was talking about her. If everyone was talking about
her, I wanted positively not to know. But nobody was