itude of beautifully indulging for that of still more
beautifully believing him.

It was always open to him to accuse her of seeing him but as the most
harmless of maniacs, and this, in the long run--since it covered so much
ground--was his easiest description of their friendship. He had a screw
loose for her but she liked him in spite of it and was practically,
against the rest of the world, his kind wise keeper, unremunerated but
fairly amused and, in the absence of other near ties, not disreputably
occupied. The rest of the world of course thought him queer, but she,
she only, knew how, and above all why, queer; which was precisely what
enabled her to dispose the concealing veil in the right folds. She took
his gaiety from him--since it had to pass with them for gaiety--as she
took everything else; but she certainly so far justified by her unerring
touch his finer sense of the degree to which he had ended by convincing
her. _She_ at least never spoke of the secret of his life except as "the
real truth about you," and she had in fact a wonderful way of making it
seem, as such, the secret of her own life too. That was in fine how he
so constantly felt her as allowing for him; he couldn't on the whole call
it anything else. He allowed for himself, but she, exactly, allowed
still more; partly because, better placed for a sight of the matter, she
traced his unhappy perversion through reaches of its course into which he
could scarce follow it. He knew how he felt, but, besides knowing that,
she knew how he looked as well; he knew each of the things of importance
he was insidiously kept from doing, but she could add up the amount they
made, understand how much, with a lighter weight on his spirit, he might
have done, and thereby establish how, clever as he was, he fell short.
Above all she was in the secret of the difference between the forms he
went through--those of his little office under Government, those of
caring for his modest patrimony, for his library, for his garden in the
country, for the people in London whose invitations he accepted and
repaid--and the detachment that reigned beneath them and that made of all
behaviour, all that could in the least be called behaviour, a long act of
dissimulation. What it had come to was that he wore a mask painted with
the social simper, out of the eye-holes of which there looked eyes of an
expression not in the least matching the other features. This the stupid
world,