, probably--they
scarcely could be as yet. Without suggestive collateral evidence there
would be nobody in the house so conscientiously infernal as Mrs.
Brissenden, Obert and I.

Newmarch had always, in our time, carried itself as the great asylum of
the finer wit, more or less expressly giving out that, as invoking
hospitality or other countenance, none of the stupid, none even of the
votaries of the grossly obvious, need apply; but I could luckily at
present reflect that its measurements in this direction had not always
been my own, and that, moreover, whatever precision they possessed,
human blandness, even in such happy halls, had not been quite abolished.
There was a sound law in virtue of which one could always--alike in
privileged and unprivileged circles--rest more on people's density than
on their penetrability. Wasn't it their density too that would be
practically nearest their good nature? Whatever her successive partners
of a moment might have noticed, they wouldn't have discovered in her
reason for dropping them quickly a principle of fear that they might
notice her failure articulately to keep up. My own actual vision, which
had developed with such affluence, was that, in a given case, she could
keep up but for a few minutes and was therefore obliged to bring the
contact to an end before exposure. I had consistently mastered her
predicament: she had at once to cultivate contacts, so that people
shouldn't guess her real concentration, and to make them a literal touch
and go, so that they shouldn't suspect the enfeeblement of her mind. It
was obviously still worth everything to her that she was so charming. I
had theorised with Mrs. Brissenden on her supposititious inanity, but
the explanation of such cynicism in either of us could only be a
sensibility to the truth that attractions so great might float her even
a long time after intelligence pure and simple should have collapsed.

Was not my present uneasiness, none the less, a private curiosity to
ascertain just how much or how little of that element she had saved from
the wreck? She dodged, doubled, managed, broke off, clutching occasions,
yet doubtless risking dumbnesses, vaguenesses and other betrayals,
depending on attitudes, motions, expressions, a material personality, in
fine, in which a plain woman would have found nothing but failure; and
peace therefore might rule the scene on every hypothesis but that of her
getting, to put it crudely, worse. H