that
he was quite aware; but she conveyed that, whatever had thus happened
for him, it was thrown into the shade by what was happening for
herself. This--though it mightn't to a detached spirit have seemed
much--was the major interest, and she met it with a new directness of
response, measuring it from hour to hour with her grave hush of
acceptance. Touched as he had so often been by her before, he was, for
his part too, touched afresh; all the more that though he could be duly
aware of the principle of his own mood he couldn't be equally so of the
principle of hers. He knew, that is, in a manner--knew roughly and
resignedly--what he himself was hatching; whereas he had to take the
chance of what he called to himself Maria's calculations. It was all
he needed that she liked him enough for what they were doing, and even
should they do a good deal more would still like him enough for that;
the essential freshness of a relation so simple was a cool bath to the
soreness produced by other relations. These others appeared to him now
horribly complex; they bristled with fine points, points all
unimaginable beforehand, points that pricked and drew blood; a fact
that gave to an hour with his present friend on a bateau-mouche, or in
the afternoon shade of the Champs Elysees, something of the innocent
pleasure of handling rounded ivory. His relation with Chad
personally--from the moment he had got his point of view--had been of
the simplest; yet this also struck him as bristling, after a third and
a fourth blank day had passed. It was as if at last however his care
for such indications had dropped; there came a fifth blank day and he
ceased to enquire or to heed.

They now took on to his fancy, Miss Gostrey and he, the image of the
Babes in the Wood; they could trust the merciful elements to let them
continue at peace. He had been great already, as he knew, at
postponements; but he had only to get afresh into the rhythm of one to
feel its fine attraction. It amused him to say to himself that he
might for all the world have been going to die--die resignedly; the
scene was filled for him with so deep a death-bed hush, so melancholy a
charm. That meant the postponement of everything else--which made so
for the quiet lapse of life; and the postponement in especial of the
reckoning to come--unless indeed the reckoning to come were to be one
and the same thing with extinction. It faced him, the reckoning, over
the shoulder of