"It is," I returned."But I've none the less, more fortunately than you, been in love for a whole one." Then I continued, from an impulse of which I had just become conscious and that was clearly the result of the heart-breaking facial contortion--heart-breaking, that is, when one knew what I knew--by which she imagined herself to represent the pleasant give-and-take of society.This sense, for me, was a quick horror of forcing her, in such conditions, to talk at all.Poor Briss had mentioned to me, as an incident of his contact with her, his apprehension of her breaking down; and now, at a touch, I saw what he had meant.She WOULD break down if I didn't look out.I found myself thus, from one minute to the other, as greatly dreading it for her, dreading it indeed for both of us, as I might have dreaded some physical accident or danger, her fall from an unmanageable horse or the crack beneath her of thin ice.It was impossible--that was the extraordinary impression--to come too much to her assistance.We had each of us all, in our way, hour after hour, been, as goodnaturedly as unwittingly, giving her a lift; yet what was the end of it but her still sitting there to assure me of a state of gratitude--that she couldn't even articulate--for every hint of a perch that might still be held out? What could only, therefore, in the connection, strike me as indicated was fairly to put into her mouth--if one might do so without showing too ungracefully as alarmed--the words one might have guessed her to wish to use were she able to use any.It was a small service of anticipation that I tried to render her with as little of an air as possible of being remedial."I daresay you wonder,"I remarked on these lines, "why, at all, I should have thrust Brissenden in.""Oh, I DO so wonder!" she replied with the refined but exaggerated glee that is a frequent form in high companies and light colloquies.I DID help her--it was admirable to feel it.She liked my imposing on her no more complex a proposition.She liked my putting the thing to her so much better than she could have put it to me.But she immediately afterwards looked away as if--now that we HAD put it, and it didn't matter which of us best--we had nothing more to do with it.She gave me a hint of drops and inconsequences that might indeed have opened up abysses, and all the while she smiled and smiled.Yet whatever she did or failed of, as I even then observed to myself, how she remained lovely! One's pleasure in that helped one somehow not to break down on one's own side--since breaking down was in question--for commiseration.I didn't know what she might have hours of for the man--whoever he was--to whom her sacrifice had been made; but I doubted if for any other person she had ever been so beautiful as she was for me at these moments.
To have kept her so, to have made her more so--how might that result of their relation not in fact have shone as a blinding light into the eyes of her lover? What would he have been bound to make out in her after all but her passion and her beauty? Wasn't it enough for such wonders as these to fill his consciousness? If they didn't fill mine--even though occupying so large a place in it--was that not only because I had not the direct benefit of them as the other party to the prodigy had it? They filled mine too, for that matter, just at this juncture, long enough for me to describe myself as rendered subject by them to a temporary loss of my thread.What COULD pass muster with her as an account of my reason for evoking the blighted identity of our friend? There came constantly into her aspect, I should say, the strangest alternatives, as I can only most conveniently call them, of presence and absence--something like intermissions of intensity, cessations and resumptions of life.They were like the slow flickers of a troubled flame, breathed upon and then left, burning up and burning down.She had really burnt down--I mean so far as her sense of things went--while I stood there.