s, of course, till my nose is rubbed into a
thing. But when it _is_--!" She celebrated her humility in a laugh that
was proud. "The two are off together."

"Off where?"

"I don't know where, but I saw them a few minutes ago most distinctly
'slope.' They've gone for a quiet, unwatched hour, poor dears, out into
the park or the gardens. When one knows it, it's all there. But what's
that vulgar song?--'You've got to know it first!' It strikes me, if you
don't mind my telling you so, that the way _you_ get hold of things is
positively uncanny. I mean as regards what first marked her for you."

"But, my dear lady," I protested, "nothing at all first marked her for
me. She _isn't_ marked for me, first or last. It was only you who so
jumped at her."

My interlocutress stared, and I had at this moment, I remember, an
almost intolerable sense of her fatuity and cruelty. They were all
unconscious, but they were, at that stage, none the less irritating. Her
fine bosom heaved, her blue eyes expanded with her successful, her
simplified egotism. I couldn't, in short, I found, bear her being so
keen about Mrs. Server while she was so stupid about poor Briss. She
seemed to recall to me nobly the fact that _she_ hadn't a lover. No, she
was only eating poor Briss up inch by inch, but she hadn't a lover. "I
don't," I insisted, "see in Mrs. Server any of the right signs."

She looked almost indignant. "Even after your telling me that you see in
Lady John only the wrong ones?"

"Ah, but there are other women here than Mrs. Server and Lady John."

"Certainly. But didn't we, a moment ago, think of them all and dismiss
them? If Lady John's out of the question, how can Mrs. Server possibly
_not_ be in it? We want a fool----"

"Ah, _do_ we?" I interruptingly wailed.

"Why, exactly by your own theory, in which you've so much interested me!
It was you who struck off the idea."

"That we want a fool?" I felt myself turning gloomy enough. "Do we
really want anyone at all?"

She gave me, in momentary silence, a strange smile. "Ah, you want to
take it back now? You're sorry you spoke. My dear man, you may be----"
but that didn't hinder the fact, in short, that I had kindled near me a
fine, if modest and timid, intelligence. There did remain the truth of
our friend's striking development, to which I had called her attention.
Regretting my rashness didn't make the prodigy less. "You'll lead me to
believe, if you back out, that there's sudde