it
before I caught the closing of the door furthest from me; at the sound
of which I looked about to find the Brissendens gone. They had not
remained for another turn, but had taken their course, evidently, back
to the principal drawing-room, where, no less presumably, the procession
of the ladies bedward was even then forming. Mrs. Briss would fall
straight into it, and I _had_ accordingly lost her. I hated to appear to
pursue her, late in the day as it may appear to affirm that I put my
dignity before my curiosity.

Free again, at all events, to wait or to wander, I lingered a minute
where I had stopped--close to a wide window, as it happened, that, at
this end of the passage, stood open to the warm darkness and overhung,
from no great height, one of the terraces. The night was mild and rich,
and though the lights within were, in deference to the temperature, not
too numerous, I found the breath of the outer air a sudden corrective to
the grossness of our lustre and the thickness of our medium, our general
heavy humanity. I felt its taste sweet, and while I leaned for
refreshment on the sill I thought of many things. One of those that
passed before me was the way that Newmarch and its hospitalities were
sacrificed, after all, and much more than smaller circles, to material
frustrations. We were all so fine and formal, and the ladies in
particular at once so little and so much clothed, so beflounced yet so
denuded, that the summer stars called to us in vain. We had ignored them
in our crystal cage, among our tinkling lamps; no more free really to
alight than if we had been dashing in a locked railway-train across a
lovely land. I remember asking myself if I mightn't still take a turn
under them, and I remember that on appealing to my watch for its
sanction I found midnight to have struck. That then was the end, and my
only real alternatives were bed or the smoking-room. The difficulty with
bed was that I was in no condition to sleep, and the difficulty about
rejoining the men was that--definitely, yes--there was one of them I
desired not again to see. I felt it with sharpness as I leaned on the
sill; I felt it with sadness as I looked at the stars; I felt once more
what I had felt on turning a final back five minutes before, so
designedly, on Mrs. Server. I saw poor Briss as he had just moved away
from me, and I knew, as I had known in the other case, that my troubled
sense would fain feel I had practically done with h