caught up with him. We had found out at last how clever he was, and
he had had to make the best of the loss of his mystery. I was strongly
tempted, as I walked beside him, to let him know how much of that
unveiling was my act; and there was a moment when I probably should have
done so had not one of the ladies of our party, snatching a place at
his other elbow, just then appealed to him in a spirit comparatively
selfish. It was very discouraging: I almost felt the liberty had been
taken with myself.

I had had on my tongue's end, for my own part, a phrase or two about
the right word at the right time; but later on I was glad not to have
spoken, for when on our return we clustered at tea I perceived Lady
Jane, who had not been out with us, brandishing _The Middle_ with her
longest arm. She had taken it up at her leisure; she was delighted with
what she had found, and I saw that, as a mistake in a man may often be a
felicity in a woman, she would practically do for me what I hadn't
been able to do for myself. "Some sweet little truths that needed to be
spoken," I heard her declare, thrusting the paper at rather a bewildered
couple by the fireplace. She grabbed it away from them again on the
reappearance of Hugh Vereker, who after our walk had been upstairs to
change something. "I know you don't in general look at this kind of
thing, but it's an occasion really for doing so. You _haven't_ seen it?
Then you must. The man has actually got _at_ you, at what _I_ always
feel, you know." Lady Jane threw into her eyes a look evidently intended
to give an idea of what she always felt; but she added that she couldn't
have expressed it. The man in the paper expressed it in a striking
manner. "Just see there, and there, where I've dashed it, how he brings
it out." She had literally marked for him the brightest patches of my
prose, and if I was a little amused Vereker himself may well have been.
He showed how much he was when before us all Lady Jane wanted to read
something aloud. I liked at any rate the way he defeated her purpose
by jerking the paper affectionately out of her clutch. He would take it
upstairs with him, would look at it on going to dress. He did this half
an hour later--I saw it in his hand when he repaired to his room. That
was the moment at which, thinking to give her pleasure, I mentioned to
Lady Jane that I was the author of the review. I did give her pleasure,
I judged, but perhaps not quite so much as I had exp