the great gardens, and that for
some of my friends also secluded thought had inducements; though it was
not, I hasten to add, that either of the pair I here encountered
appeared to be striking out in any very original direction. Lady John
and Guy Brissenden, in the arbour, were thinking secludedly together;
they were together, that is, because they were scarce a foot apart, and
they were thinking, I inferred, because they were doing nothing else.
Silence, by every symptom, had definitely settled on them, and whatever
it was I interrupted had no resemblance to talk. Nothing--in the general
air of evidence--had more struck me than that what Lady John's famous
intellect seemed to draw most from Brissenden's presence was the
liberty to rest. Yet it shook off this languor as soon as she saw me; it
threw itself straight into the field; it went, I could see, through all
the motions required of it by her ladyship's fallacious philosophy. I
could mark these emotions, and what determined them, as behind clear
glass.

I found, on my side, a rare intellectual joy, the oddest secret
exultation, in feeling her begin instantly to play the part I had
attributed to her in the irreducible drama. She broke out in a manner
that could only have had for its purpose to represent to me that mere
weak amiability had committed her to such a predicament. It was to
humour her friend's husband that she had strayed so far, for she was
somehow sorry for him, and--good creature as we all knew her--had, on
principle, a kind little way of her own with silly infatuations. His
_was_ silly, but it was unmistakable, and she had for some time been
finding it, in short, a case for a special tact. That he bored her to
death I might have gathered by the way they sat there, and she could
trust me to believe--couldn't she?--that she was only musing as to how
she might most humanely get rid of him. She would lead him safely back
to the fold if I would give her time. She seemed to ask it all, oddly,
of _me_, to take me remarkably into her confidence, to refer me, for a
specimen of his behaviour, to his signal abandonment of his wife the
day before, his having waited over, to come down, for the train in which
poor _she_ was to travel. It was at all events, I felt, one of the
consequences of having caught on to so much that I by this time found
myself catching on to everything. I read into Lady John's wonderful
manner--which quite clamoured, moreover, for an interpre