ary, her exquisite weakness simply opened up the depths
it would have closed. It was in short a supremely unsuccessful attempt
to say nothing. It said everything, and by the end of a minute my
chatter--none the less out of place for being all audible--was hushed to
positive awe by what it had conveyed. I saw as I had never seen before
what consuming passion can make of the marked mortal on whom, with fixed
beak and claws, it has settled as on a prey. She reminded me of a sponge
wrung dry and with fine pores agape. Voided and scraped of everything,
her shell was merely crushable. So it was brought home to me that the
victim could be abased, and so it disengaged itself from these things
that the abasement could be conscious. That was Mrs. Server's tragedy,
that her consciousness survived--survived with a force that made it
struggle and dissemble. This consciousness was all her secret--it was at
any rate all mine. I promised myself roundly that I would henceforth
keep clear of any other.

I none the less--from simply sitting with her there--gathered in the
sense of more things than I could have named, each of which, as it came
to me, made my compassion more tender. Who of us all could say that his
fall might not be as deep?--or might not at least become so with equal
opportunity. I for a while fairly forgot Mrs. Server, I fear, in the
intimacy of this vision of the possibilities of our common nature. She
became such a wasted and dishonoured symbol of them as might have put
tears in one's eyes. When I presently returned to her--our session
seeming to resolve itself into a mere mildness of silence--I saw how it
was that whereas, in such cases in general, people might have given up
much, the sort of person this poor lady was could only give up
everything. She was the absolute wreck of her storm, accordingly, but to
which the pale ghost of a special sensibility still clung, waving from
the mast, with a bravery that went to the heart, the last tatter of its
flag. There are impressions too fine for words, and I shall not attempt
to say how it was that under the touch of this one I felt how nothing
that concerned my companion could ever again be present to me but the
fact itself of her admirable state. This was the source of her wan
little glory, constituted even for her a small sublimity in the light of
which mere minor identifications turned vulgar. I knew who _he_ was now
with a vengeance, because I had learnt precisely from th