to attract his attention to
my slighted charms. She didn't know--no one knew--how proud I had been
to serve him and to stick to our terms; yet she nonetheless took the
measure, I think, of the warning I now gave her. "If you should so lose
your head as to appeal to him for me--"

She was really frightened. "Yes, miss?"

"I would leave, on the spot, both him and you."

XIII

It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as
much as ever an effort beyond my strength--offered, in close quarters,
difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation continued a
month, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the note above
all, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the part
of my pupils. It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my mere
infernal imagination: it was absolutely traceable that they were aware
of my predicament and that this strange relation made, in a manner, for
a long time, the air in which we moved. I don't mean that they had their
tongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for that was not one
of their dangers: I do mean, on the other hand, that the element of the
unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater than any other, and
that so much avoidance could not have been so successfully effected
without a great deal of tacit arrangement. It was as if, at moments, we
were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop
short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind,
closing with a little bang that made us look at each other--for, like
all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended--the doors we
had indiscreetly opened. All roads lead to Rome, and there were times
when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or
subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground. Forbidden ground was
the question of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, in
especial, might survive, in memory, of the friends little children had
lost. There were days when I could have sworn that one of them had, with
a small invisible nudge, said to the other: "She thinks she'll do it
this time--but she WON'T!" To "do it" would have been to indulge for
instance--and for once in a way--in some direct reference to the lady
who had prepared them for my discipline. They had a delightful endless
appetite for passages in my own history, to which I had again and
again treated them; they were i