of his apparently
incorruptible constancy?"

"I mean because the whole thing's so before one. She has him so in hand
that they're neither of them in as much danger as would count for a
mouse. It doesn't prevent his liking to dally by the way--for _she_
dallies by the way, and he does everything she does. Haven't I observed
her," Lady John continued, "dallying a little, so far as that goes, with
_you_? You've the tact to tell me that he doesn't think me good enough,
but I don't require, do I?--for such a purpose as his--to be very
extraordinarily good. You may say that you wrap it up immensely and try
to sugar the dose! Well, all the same, give up, for a quiet life, the
attempt to be a providence. You can't be a providence and not be a bore.
A real providence _knows_; whereas you," said Lady John, making her
point neatly, "have to find out--and to find out even by asking 'the
likes of' _me_. Your fine speech meanwhile doesn't a bit tell me what."

It affected me again that she could get so near without getting nearer.
True enough it was that I wanted to find out; and though I might expect,
or fear, too much of her, I wondered at her only seeing this--at her
not reading deeper. The peril of the public ugliness that haunted me
rose or fell, at this moment, with my varying view of her density. Or
rather, to be more exact, I already saw her as necessarily stupid
because I saw her as extravagantly vain. What I see now of course is
that I was on my own side almost stupidly hard with her--as I may also
at that hour have been subject to her other vice. Didn't I perhaps, in
proportion as I felt how little she saw, think awfully well of myself,
as we said at Newmarch, for seeing so much more? It comes back to me
that the sense thus established of my superior vision may perfectly have
gone a little to my head. If it was a frenzied fallacy I was all to
blame, but if it was anything else whatever it was naturally
intoxicating. I really remember in fact that nothing so much as this
confirmed presumption of my impunity had appeared to me to mark the fine
quality of my state. I think there must fairly have been a pitch at
which I was not sure that not to partake of that state was, on the part
of others, the sign of a gregarious vulgarity; as if there were a
positive advantage, an undiluted bliss, in the intensity of
consciousness that I had reached. _I_ alone was magnificently and
absurdly aware--everyone else was benightedly out of it