s brought home sometimes
do make us; but he was held there by something so hard that it was
fairly grim. This was not the discomposure of last night; that had
quite passed--such discomposures were a detail; the real coercion was
to see a man ineffably adored. There it was again--it took women, it
took women; if to deal with them was to walk on water what wonder that
the water rose? And it had never surely risen higher than round this
woman. He presently found himself taking a long look from her, and the
next thing he knew he had uttered all his thought. "You're afraid for
your life!"

It drew out her long look, and he soon enough saw why. A spasm came
into her face, the tears she had already been unable to hide overflowed
at first in silence, and then, as the sound suddenly comes from a
child, quickened to gasps, to sobs. She sat and covered her face with
her hands, giving up all attempt at a manner. "It's how you see me,
it's how you see me"--she caught her breath with it--"and it's as I AM,
and as I must take myself, and of course it's no matter." Her emotion
was at first so incoherent that he could only stand there at a loss,
stand with his sense of having upset her, though of having done it by
the truth. He had to listen to her in a silence that he made no
immediate effort to attenuate, feeling her doubly woeful amid all her
dim diffused elegance; consenting to it as he had consented to the
rest, and even conscious of some vague inward irony in the presence of
such a fine free range of bliss and bale. He couldn't say it was NOT
no matter; for he was serving her to the end, he now knew,
anyway--quite as if what he thought of her had nothing to do with it.
It was actually moreover as if he didn't think of her at all, as if he
could think of nothing but the passion, mature, abysmal, pitiful, she
represented, and the possibilities she betrayed. She was older for him
to-night, visibly less exempt from the touch of time; but she was as
much as ever the finest and subtlest creature, the happiest apparition,
it had been given him, in all his years, to meet; and yet he could see
her there as vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as a maidservant crying
for her young man. The only thing was that she judged herself as the
maidservant wouldn't; the weakness of which wisdom too, the dishonour
of which judgement, seemed but to sink her lower. Her collapse,
however, no doubt, was briefer and she had in a manner recovered
he