y best friend meant for me, and I complete my little
history of my patience and my pain by the frank statement of my having,
in a postscript to my very first letter to her after the receipt of the
hideous news, asked Mrs. Corvick whether her husband had not at least
finished the great article on Vereker. Her answer was as prompt as
my inquiry: the article, which had been barely begun, was a mere
heartbreaking scrap. She explained that Corvick had just settled down to
it when he was interrupted by her mother's death; then, on his return,
he had been kept from work by the engrossments into which that calamity
plunged them. The opening pages were all that existed; they were
striking, they were promising, but they didn't unveil the idol. That
great intellectual feat was obviously to have formed his climax. She
said nothing more, nothing to enlighten me as to the state of her own
knowledge--the knowledge for the acquisition of which I had conceived
her doing prodigious things. This was above all what I wanted to know:
had _she_ seen the idol unveiled? Had there been a private ceremony for
a palpitating audience of one? For what else but that ceremony had
the previous ceremony been enacted? I didn't like as yet to press her,
though when I thought of what had passed between us on the subject in
Corvick's absence her reticence surprised me. It was therefore not till
much later, from Meran, that I risked another appeal, risked it in some
trepidation, for she continued to tell me nothing. "Did you hear in
those few days of your blighted bliss," I wrote, "what we desired so to
hear?" I said "we" as a little hint; and she showed me she could take a
little hint. "I heard everything," she replied, "and I mean to keep it
to myself!"

IX

It was impossible not to be moved with the strongest sympathy for her,
and on my return to England I showed her every kindness in my power. Her
mother's death had made her means sufficient, and she had gone to
live in a more convenient quarter. But her loss had been great and her
visitation cruel; it never would have occurred to me moreover to suppose
she could come to regard the enjoyment of a technical tip, of a piece
of literary experience, as a counterpoise to her grief. Strange to say,
none the less, I couldn't help fancying after I had seen her a few times
that I caught a glimpse of some such oddity. I hasten to add that there
had been other things I couldn't help fancying; and as I never