with which again,
uncontrollably tossed on one of my surges of certitude, I turned away.
_How_ deep they must have been in together for her to have so at last
gathered herself up, and in how doubly interesting a light, above all,
it seemed to present Long for the future! That was, while I warned
myself, what I most read in--literally an implication of the enhancement
of this latter side of the prodigy. If his cleverness, under the alarm
that, first stirring their consciousness but dimly, had so swiftly
developed as to make next of each a mirror for the other, and then to
precipitate for them, in some silence deeper than darkness, the exchange
of recognitions, admissions and, as they certainly would have phrased
it, tips--if his excited acuteness was henceforth to protect itself by
dissimulation, what wouldn't perhaps, for one's diversion, be the new
spectacle and wonder? I could in a manner already measure this larger
play by the amplitude freshly determined in Mrs. Briss, and I was for a
moment actually held by the thought of the possible finish our friend
would find it in him to give to a represented, a fictive ineptitude.
The sharpest jostle to my thought, in this rush, might well have been,
I confess, the reflection that as it was I who had arrested, who had
spoiled their unconsciousness, so it was natural they should fight
against me for a possible life in the state I had given them instead. I
had spoiled their unconsciousness, I had destroyed it, and it was
consciousness alone that could make them effectively cruel. Therefore,
if they were cruel, it was I who had determined it, inasmuch as,
consciously, they could only want, they could only intend, to live.
Wouldn't that question have been, I managed even now to ask myself, the
very basis on which they had inscrutably come together? "It's life, you
know," each had said to the other, "and I, accordingly, can only cling
to mine. But you, poor dear--shall _you_ give up?" "Give up?" the other
had replied; "for what do you take me? I shall fight by your side,
please, and we can compare and exchange weapons and manoeuvres, and
you may in every way count upon me."

That was what, with greater vividness, was for the rest of the occasion
before me, or behind me; and that I had done it all and had only myself
to thank for it was what, from this minute, by the same token, was more
and more for me the inner essence of Mrs. Briss's attitude. I know not
what heavy admonition o