f my responsibility had thus suddenly descended
on me; but nothing, under it, was indeed more sensible than that
practically it paralysed me. And I could only say to myself that this
was the price--the price of the secret success, the lonely liberty and
the intellectual joy. There were things that for so private and splendid
a revel--that of the exclusive king with his Wagner opera--I could only
let go, and the special torment of my case was that the condition of
light, of the satisfaction of curiosity and of the attestation of
triumph, was in this direct way the sacrifice of feeling. There was no
point at which my assurance could, by the scientific method, judge
itself complete enough not to regard feeling as an interference and, in
consequence, as a possible check. If it had to go I knew well who went
with it, but I wasn't there to save _them_. I was there to save my
priceless pearl of an inquiry and to harden, to that end, my heart. I
should need indeed all my hardness, as well as my brightness, moreover,
to meet Mrs. Briss on the high level to which I had at last induced her
to mount, and, even while I prolonged the movement by which I had
momentarily stayed her, the intermission of her speech became itself for
me a hint of the peculiar pertinence of caution. It lasted long enough,
this drop, to suggest that her attention was the sharper for my having
turned away from it, and I should have feared a renewed challenge if she
hadn't, by good luck, presently gone on: "There's really nothing in him
at all!"

XIV

I had faced her again just in time to take it, and I immediately made up
my mind how best to do so. "Then I go utterly to pieces!"

"You shouldn't have perched yourself," she laughed--she could by this
time almost coarsely laugh--"in such a preposterous place!"

"Ah, that's my affair," I returned, "and if I accept the consequences I
don't quite see what you've to say to it. That I do accept them--so far
as I make them out as not too intolerable and you as not intending them
to be--that I do accept them is what I've been trying to signify to you.
Only my fall," I added, "is an inevitable shock. You remarked to me a
few minutes since that you didn't recover yourself in a flash. I differ
from you, you see, in that _I_ do; I take my collapse all at once. Here
then I am. I'm smashed. I don't see, as I look about me, a piece I can
pick up. I don't attempt to account for my going wrong; I don't attempt
to a