My personal privilege, on the basis of the full consciousness, had become, on the spot, in the turn of an eye, more than questionable, and I was really quite scared at the chance of having to face--of having to see THEM face--another recognition.What did this alarm imply but the complete reversal of my estimate of the value of perception? Mrs.Brissenden and Long had been hitherto magnificently without it, and I was responsible perhaps for having, in a mood practically much stupider than the stupidest of theirs, put them gratuitously and helplessly ON it.To be without it was the most consistent, the most successful, because the most amiable, form of selfishness; and why should people admirably equipped for remaining so, people bright and insolent in their prior state, people in whom this state was to have been respected as a surface without a scratch is respected, be made to begin to vibrate, to crack and split, from within? Wasn't it enough for ME to pay, vicariously, the tax on being absurd? Were we all to be landed, without an issue or a remedy, in a condition on which that tax would be generally levied? It was as if, abruptly, with a new emotion, I had wished to unthink every thought with which I had been occupied for twenty-four hours.Let me add, however, that even had this process been manageable I was aware of not proposing to begin it till I should have done with Lady John.
The time she took to meet my last remark is naturally not represented by this prolonged glance of mine at the amount of suggestion that just then happened to reach me from the other quarter.It at all events duly came out between us that Mrs.Server was the person I did have on my mind;and I remember that it had seemed to me at the end of a minute to matter comparatively little by which of us, after all, she was first designated.
There is perhaps an oddity--which I must set down to my emotion of the moment--in my not now being able to say.I should have been hugely startled if the sight of Gilbert Long had appeared to make my companion suddenly think of her; and reminiscence of that shock is not one of those I have found myself storing up.What does abide with me is the memory of how, after a little, my apprehensions, of various kinds, dropped--most of all under the deepening conviction that Lady John was not a whit less agreeably superficial than I could even at the worst have desired.The point established for me was that, whereas she passed with herself and so many others as taking in everything, she had taken in nothing whatever that it was to my purpose she should not take.Vast, truly, was the world of observation, that we could both glean in it so actively without crossing each other's steps.There we stood close together, yet--save for the accident of a final dash, as I shall note--were at opposite ends of the field.