e advantage, as it were, of
his relief. The woman at home, the woman to whom he was attached, was
before him just long enough to give him again the measure of the
wretchedness, in fact really of the shame, of their having to recognise
the formation, between them, of a "split." He had taken this measure
in solitude and meditation: but the catastrophe, as Sarah steamed up,
looked for its seconds unprecedentedly dreadful--or proved, more
exactly, altogether unthinkable; so that his finding something free and
familiar to respond to brought with it an instant renewal of his
loyalty. He had suddenly sounded the whole depth, had gasped at what
he might have lost.

Well, he could now, for the quarter of an hour of their detention hover
about the travellers as soothingly as if their direct message to him
was that he had lost nothing. He wasn't going to have Sarah write to
her mother that night that he was in any way altered or strange. There
had been times enough for a month when it had seemed to him that he was
strange, that he was altered, in every way; but that was a matter for
himself; he knew at least whose business it was not; it was not at all
events such a circumstance as Sarah's own unaided lights would help her
to. Even if she had come out to flash those lights more than yet
appeared she wouldn't make much headway against mere pleasantness. He
counted on being able to be merely pleasant to the end, and if only
from incapacity moreover to formulate anything different. He couldn't
even formulate to himself his being changed and queer; it had taken
place, the process, somewhere deep down; Maria Gostrey had caught
glimpses of it; but how was he to fish it up, even if he desired, for
Mrs. Pocock? This was then the spirit in which he hovered, and with
the easier throb in it much indebted furthermore to the impression of
high and established adequacy as a pretty girl promptly produced in him
by Mamie. He had wondered vaguely--turning over many things in the
fidget of his thoughts--if Mamie WERE as pretty as Woollett published
her; as to which issue seeing her now again was to be so swept away by
Woollett's opinion that this consequence really let loose for the
imagination an avalanche of others. There were positively five minutes
in which the last word seemed of necessity to abide with a Woollett
represented by a Mamie. This was the sort of truth the place itself
would feel; it would send her forth in confidence;