he instant its origin. "She has confided to my
judgement and my tenderness the expression of her personal sense of
everything, and the assertion of her personal dignity."

They were the very words of the lady of Woollett--he would have known
them in a thousand; her parting charge to her child. Mrs. Pocock
accordingly spoke to this extent by book, and the fact immensely moved
him. "If she does really feel as you say it's of course very very
dreadful. I've given sufficient proof, one would have thought," he
added, "of my deep admiration for Mrs. Newsome."

"And pray what proof would one have thought you'd CALL sufficient? That
of thinking this person here so far superior to her?"

He wondered again; he waited. "Ah dear Sarah, you must LEAVE me this
person here!"

In his desire to avoid all vulgar retorts, to show how, even
perversely, he clung to his rag of reason, he had softly almost wailed
this plea. Yet he knew it to be perhaps the most positive declaration
he had ever made in his life, and his visitor's reception of it
virtually gave it that importance. "That's exactly what I'm delighted
to do. God knows WE don't want her! You take good care not to meet,"
she observed in a still higher key, "my question about their life. If
you do consider it a thing one can even SPEAK of, I congratulate you on
your taste!"

The life she alluded to was of course Chad's and Madame de Vionnet's,
which she thus bracketed together in a way that made him wince a
little; there being nothing for him but to take home her full
intention. It was none the less his inconsequence that while he had
himself been enjoying for weeks the view of the brilliant woman's
specific action, he just suffered from any characterisation of it by
other lips. "I think tremendously well of her, at the same time that I
seem to feel her 'life' to be really none of my business. It's my
business, that is, only so far as Chad's own life is affected by it;
and what has happened, don't you see? is that Chad's has been affected
so beautifully. The proof of the pudding's in the eating"--he tried,
with no great success, to help it out with a touch of pleasantry, while
she let him go on as if to sink and sink. He went on however well
enough, as well as he could do without fresh counsel; he indeed
shouldn't stand quite firm, he felt, till he should have re-established
his communications with Chad. Still, he could always speak for the
woman he had so defini