But there was that in me that could let him see he had far from done;and something, above all, told me now that he absolutely mustn't have before I had.I quickly moreover saw that I must, with an art, make him want not to."Back to what she was when you painted her?"He had to think an instant for this."No--not quite to that.""To what then?"
He tried in a manner to oblige me."To something else."It seemed so, for my thought, the gleam of something that fitted, that I was almost afraid of quenching the gleam by pressure.I must then get everything I could from him without asking too much."You don't quite know to WHAT else?""No--I don't quite know." But there was a sound in it, this time, that I took as the hint of a wish to know--almost a recognition that I might help him.
I helped him accordingly as I could and, I may add, as far as the positive flutter he had stirred in me suffered.It fitted--it fitted! "If her change is to something other, I suppose then a change back is not quite the exact name for it.""Perhaps not." I fairly thrilled at his taking the suggestion as if it were an assistance."She isn't at any rate what I thought her yesterday."It was amazing into what depths this dropped for me and with what possibilities it mingled."I remember what you said of her yesterday."I drew him on so that I brought back for him the very words he had used.
"She was so beastly unhappy." And he used them now visibly not as a remembrance of what he had said, but for the contrast of the fact with what he at present perceived; so that the value this gave for me to what he at present perceived was immense.
"And do you mean that that's gone?"
He hung fire, however, a little as to saying so much what he meant, and while he waited he again looked at me."What do YOU mean? Don't you think so yourself?"I laid my hand on his arm and held him a moment with a grip that betrayed, I daresay, the effort in me to keep my thoughts together and lose not a thread.It betrayed at once, doubtless, the danger of that failure and the sharp foretaste of success.I remember that with it, absolutely, Istruck myself as knowing again the joy of the intellectual mastery of things unamenable, that joy of determining, almost of creating results, which I have already mentioned as an exhilaration attached to some of my plunges of insight."It would take long to tell you what I mean."The tone of it made him fairly watch me as I had been watching him.
"Well, haven't we got the whole night?"
"Oh, it would take more than the whole night--even if we had it!""By which you suggest that we haven't it?""No--we haven't it.I want to get away."
"To go to bed? I thought you were so keen.""I AM keen.Keen is no word for it.I don't want to go to bed.I want to get away.""To leave the house--in the middle of the night?""Yes--absurd as it may seem.You excite me too much.You don't know what you do to me."He continued to look at me; then he gave a laugh which was not the contradiction, but quite the attestation, of the effect produced on him by my grip.If I had wanted to hold him I held him.It only came to me even that I held him too much.I felt this in fact with the next thing he said."If you're too excited, then, to be coherent now, will you tell me to-morrow?"I took time myself now to relight.Ridiculous as it may sound, I had my nerves to steady; which is a proof, surely, that for real excitement there are no such adventures as intellectual ones."Oh, tomorrow I shall be off in space!""Certainly we shall neither of us be here.But can't we arrange, say, to meet in town, or even to go up together in such conditions as will enable us to talk?"I patted his arm again."Thank you for your patience.It's really good of you.Who knows if I shall be alive to-morrow? We ARE meeting.We do talk."But with all I had to think of I must have fallen, on this, into the deepest of silences, for the next thing I remember is his returning: "We don't!" I repeated my gesture of reassurance, I conveyed that I should be with him again in a minute, and presently, while he gave me time, he came back to something of his own."My wink, at all events, would have been nothing for any question between us, as I've just said, without yours.
That's what I call your responsibility.It was, as we put the matter, the torch of your analogy--""Oh, the torch of my analogy!"
I had so groaned it--as if for very ecstasy--that it pulled him up, and I could see his curiosity as indeed reaffected.But he went on with a coherency that somewhat admonished me: "It was your ****** me, as I told you this morning, think over what you had said about Brissenden and his wife: it was THAT--""That made you think over"--I took him straight up--"what you yourself had said about our troubled lady? Yes, precisely.That WAS the torch of my analogy.What I showed you in the one case seemed to tell you what to look for in the other.You thought it over.I accuse you of nothing worse than of HAVING thought it over.But you see what thinking it over does for it."The way I said this appeared to amuse him."I see what it does for YOU!""No, you don't! Not at all yet.That's just the embarrassment.""Just whose?" If I had thanked him for his patience he showed that he deserved it."Just yours?""Well, say mine.But when you do--!" And I paused as for the rich promise of it.
"When I do see where you are, you mean?"
"The only difficulty is whether you CAN see.But we must try.You've set me whirling round, but we must go step by step.Oh, but it's all in your germ!"--I kept that up."If she isn't now beastly unhappy ""She's beastly happy?" he broke in, getting firmer hold, if not of the real impression he had just been gathering under my eyes, then at least of something he had begun to make out that my argument required."Well, that IS the way I see her difference.Her difference, I mean," he added, in his evident wish to work with me, "her difference from her other difference!
There!" He laughed as if, also, he had found himself fairly fantastic.
"Isn't THAT clear for you?"