s odd, fairly veiling
her identity, shifting her back into a mere voluble class or race to
the intense audibility of which he was by this time inured. When she
spoke the charming slightly strange English he best knew her by he
seemed to feel her as a creature, among all the millions, with a
language quite to herself, the real monopoly of a special shade of
speech, beautifully easy for her, yet of a colour and a cadence that
were both inimitable and matters of accident. She came back to these
things after they had shaken down in the inn-parlour and knew, as it
were, what was to become of them; it was inevitable that loud
ejaculation over the prodigy of their convergence should at last wear
itself out. Then it was that his impression took fuller form--the
impression, destined only to deepen, to complete itself, that they had
something to put a face upon, to carry off and make the best of, and
that it was she who, admirably on the whole, was doing this. It was
familiar to him of course that they had something to put a face upon;
their friendship, their connexion, took any amount of explaining--that
would have been made familiar by his twenty minutes with Mrs. Pocock if
it hadn't already been so. Yet his theory, as we know, had bountifully
been that the facts were specifically none of his business, and were,
over and above, so far as one had to do with them, intrinsically
beautiful; and this might have prepared him for anything, as well as
rendered him proof against mystification. When he reached home that
night, however, he knew he had been, at bottom, neither prepared nor
proof; and since we have spoken of what he was, after his return, to
recall and interpret, it may as well immediately be said that his real
experience of these few hours put on, in that belated vision--for he
scarce went to bed till morning--the aspect that is most to our purpose.

He then knew more or less how he had been affected--he but half knew at
the time. There had been plenty to affect him even after, as has been
said, they had shaken down; for his consciousness, though muffled, had
its sharpest moments during this passage, a marked drop into innocent
friendly Bohemia. They then had put their elbows on the table,
deploring the premature end of their two or three dishes; which they
had tried to make up with another bottle while Chad joked a little
spasmodically, perhaps even a little irrelevantly, with the hostess.
What it all came to had b