of
us what was the matter with him. He was unconscious of how he had "come
out"--which was exactly what sharpened my wonder. Lady John, on her
side, was thoroughly conscious, and I had a fancy that she looked at me
to measure how far _I_ was. I cared, naturally, not in the least what
she guessed; her interest for me was all in the operation of her
influence. I am afraid I watched to catch it in the act--watched her
with a curiosity of which she might well have become aware.

What an intimacy, what an intensity of relation, I said to myself, so
successful a process implied! It was of course familiar enough that when
people were so deeply in love they rubbed off on each other--that a
great pressure of soul to soul usually left on either side a sufficient
show of tell-tale traces. But for Long to have been so stamped as I
found him, how the pliant wax must have been prepared and the seal of
passion applied! What an affection the woman working such a change in
him must have managed to create as a preface to her influence! With what
a sense of her charm she must have paved the way for it! Strangely
enough, however--it was even rather irritating--there was nothing more
than usual in Lady John to assist my view of the height at which the
pair so evoked must move. These things--the way other people could feel
about each other, the power not one's self, in the given instance, that
made for passion--were of course at best the mystery of mysteries;
still, there were cases in which fancy, sounding the depths or the
shallows, could at least drop the lead. Lady John, perceptibly, was no
such case; imagination, in her presence, was but the weak wing of the
insect that bumps against the glass. She was pretty, prompt, hard, and,
in a way that was special to her, a mistress at once of "culture" and of
slang. She was like a hat--with one of Mrs. Briss's hat-pins--askew on
the bust of Virgil. Her ornamental information--as strong as a coat of
furniture-polish--almost knocked you down. What I felt in her now more
than ever was that, having a reputation for "point" to keep up, she was
always under arms, with absences and anxieties like those of a celebrity
at a public dinner. She thought too much of her "speech"--of how soon it
would have to come. It was none the less wonderful, however, that, as
Grace Brissenden had said, she should still find herself with intellect
to spare--have lavished herself by precept and example on Long and yet
have