bears. _Was_ this
'something' your conclusion, then and there, that there's nothing in
anything?"

She kept her distance. "'In anything'?"

"And that I could only be, accordingly, out of my mind? Come," I
patiently pursued; "such a perception as that had, at some instant or
other, to _begin_; and I'm only trying to aid you to recollect when the
devil it did!"

"Does it particularly matter?" Mrs. Briss inquired.

I felt my chin. "That depends a little--doesn't it?--on what you mean by
'matter'! It matters for your meeting my curiosity, and that matters, in
its turn, as we just arranged, for my releasing you. You may ask of
course if my curiosity itself matters; but to that, fortunately, my
reply can only be of the clearest. The satisfaction of my curiosity is
the pacification of my mind. We've granted, we've accepted, I again
press upon you, in respect to that precarious quantity, its topsy-turvy
state. Only give me a lead; I don't ask you for more. Let me for an
instant see play before me any feeble reflection whatever of the flash
of new truth that unsettled you."

I thought for a moment that, in her despair, she would find something
that would do. But she only found: "It didn't come in a flash."

I remained all patience. "It came little by little? It began then
perhaps earlier in the day than the moment to which I allude? And yet,"
I continued, "we were pretty well on in the day, I must keep in mind,
when I had your last news of your credulity."

"My credulity?"

"Call it then, if you don't like the word, your sympathy."

I had given her time, however, to produce at last something that, it
visibly occurred to her, might pass. "As soon as I was not with you--I
mean with you personally--you _never_ had my sympathy."

"Is my person then so irresistible?"

Well, she was brave. "It _was_. But it's not, thank God, now!"

"Then there we are again at our mystery! I don't think, you know," I
made out for her, "it was my person, really, that gave its charm to my
theory; I think it was much more my theory that gave its charm to my
person. My person, I flatter myself, has remained through these few
hours--hours of tension, but of a tension, you see, purely
intellectual--as good as ever; so that if we're not, even in our
anomalous situation, in danger from any such source, it's simply that my
theory is dead and that the blight of the rest is involved."

My words were indeed many, but she plumped straight through t