d really have counted for me as the least of my
precious anomalies, but that--as accident happened to protect me--I
watched, so long as I might, with intensity. I should in this connection
describe my eyes as yet again engaging the less scrutable side of the
human figure, were it not that poor Briss's back, now presented to me
beside his wife's--for these were the elements of the combination--had
hitherto seemed to me the most eloquent of his aspects. It was when he
presented his face that he looked, each time, older; but it was when he
showed you, from behind, the singular stoop of his shoulders, that he
looked oldest.

They had just passed the door when I emerged, and they receded, at a
slow pace and with a kind of confidential nearness, down the long avenue
of the lobby. Her head was always high and her husband's always low, so
that I couldn't be sure--it might have been only my fancy--that the
contrast of this habit was more marked in them than usual. If I had
known nothing about them I should have just unimaginatively said that
talk was all on one side and attention all on the other. I, of course,
for that matter, _did_ know nothing about them; yet I recall how it came
to me, as my extemporised shrewdness hung in their rear, that I mustn't
think anything too grossly simple of what might be taking place between
them. My position was, in spite of myself, that of my having mastered
enough possibilities to choose from. If one of these might be--for her
face, in spite of the backward cock of her head, was turned to him--that
she was looking her time of life straight _at_ him and yet making love
to him with it as hard as ever she could, so another was that he had
been already so thoroughly got back into hand that she had no need of
asking favours, that she was more splendid than ever, and that, the same
poor Briss as before his brief adventure, he was only feeling afresh in
his soul, as a response to her, the gush of the sacred fount.
Presumptous choice as to these alternatives failed, on my part, in time,
let me say, to flower; it rose before me in time that, whatever might
be, for the exposed instant, the deep note of their encounter, only one
thing concerned me in it: its being wholly their own business. So for
that I liberally let it go, passing into the corridor, but proceeding in
the opposite sense and aiming at an issue which I judged I should reach
before they would turn in their walk. I had not, however, reached