emen they
couldn't more intimately go on with? It was what they, no doubt,
sincerely fancied they could make of men of whom they couldn't make
husbands. And she didn't even reason that it was, by a similar law, the
expedient of doctors in general for the invalids of whom they couldn't
make patients: she was somehow so sufficiently aware that _her_ doctor
was--however fatuous it might sound--exceptionally moved. This was the
damning little fact--if she could talk of damnation: that she could
believe herself to have caught him in the act of irrelevantly liking
her. She hadn't gone to him to be liked, she had gone to him to be
judged; and he was quite a great enough man to be in the habit, as a
rule, of observing the difference. She could like _him,_ as she
distinctly did--that was another matter; all the more that her doing so
was now, so obviously for herself, compatible with judgment. Yet it
would have been all portentously mixed had not, as we say, a final,
merciful wave, chilling rather, but washing clear, come to her
assistance.

It came, of a sudden, when all other thought was spent. She had been
asking herself why, if her case was grave--and she knew what she meant
by that--he should have talked to her at all about what she might with
futility "do"; or why on the other hand, if it were light, he should
attach an importance to the office of friendship. She had him, with her
little lonely acuteness--as acuteness went during the dog-days in the
Regent's Park--in a cleft stick: she either mattered, and then she was
ill; or she didn't matter, and then she was well enough. Now he was
"acting," as they said at home, as if she did matter--until he should
prove the contrary. It was too evident that a person at his high
pressure must keep his inconsistencies, which were probably his highest
amusements, only for the very greatest occasions. Her prevision, in
fine, of just where she should catch him furnished the light of that
judgment in which we describe her as daring to indulge. And the
judgment it was that made her sensation simple. He _had_ distinguished
her--that was the chill. He hadn't known--how could he?--that she was
devilishly subtle, subtle exactly in the manner of the suspected, the
suspicious, the condemned. He in fact confessed to it, in his way, as
to an interest in her combinations, her funny race, her funny losses,
her funny gains, her funny freedom, and, no doubt, above all, her funny
manners--funny, like