I saw other things, many things, after this, but I had already so much matter for reflection that I saw them almost in spite of myself.The difficulty with me was in the momentum already acquired by the act--as well as, doubtless, by the general habit--of observation.I remember indeed that on separating from Mrs.Brissenden I took a lively resolve to get rid of my ridiculous obsession.It was absurd to have consented to such immersion, intellectually speaking, in the affairs of other people.One had always affairs of one's own, and I was positively neglecting mine.Such, for a while, was my foremost reflection; after which, in their order or out of it, came an inevitable train of others.One of the first of these was that, frankly, my affairs were by this time pretty well used to my neglect.There were connections enough in which it had never failed.A whole cluster of such connections, effectually displacing the centre of interest, now surrounded me, and Iwas--though always but intellectually--drawn into their circle.I did my best for the rest of the day to turn my back on them, but with the prompt result of feeling that I meddled with them almost more in thinking them over in isolation than in hovering personally about them.Reflection was the real intensity; reflection, as to poor Mrs.Server in particular, was an indiscreet opening of doors.She became vivid in the light of the so limited vision of her that I already possessed--try positively as I would not further to extend it.It was something not to ask another question, to keep constantly away both from Mrs.Brissenden and from Ford Obert, whom I had rashly invited to a degree of participation; it was something to talk as hard as possible with other persons and on other subjects, to mingle in groups much more superficial than they supposed themselves, to give ear to broader jokes, to discuss more tangible mysteries.
The day, as it developed, was large and hot, an unstinted splendour of summer; excursions, exercise, organised amusement were things admirably spared us; life became a mere arrested ramble or stimulated lounge, and we profited to the full by the noble freedom of Newmarch, that overarching ease which in nothing was so marked as in the tolerance of talk.The air of the place itself, in such conditions, left one's powers with a sense of play; if one wanted something to play at one simply played at being there.I did this myself, with the aid, in especial, of two or three solitary strolls, unaccompanied dips, of half an hour a-piece, into outlying parts of the house and the grounds.I must add that while I resorted to such measures not to see I only fixed what I HAD seen, what I did see, the more in my mind.One of these things had been the way that, at luncheon, Gilbert Long, watching the chance given him by the loose order in which we moved to it, slipped, to the visible defeat of somebody else, into the chair of conspicuity beside clever Lady John.A second was that Mrs.Server then occupied a place as remote as possible from this couple, but not from Guy Brissenden, who had found means to seat himself next her while my notice was engaged by the others.What I was at the same time supremely struck with could doubtless only be Mrs.Server's bright ubiquity, as it had at last come to seem to me, and that of the companions she had recruited for the occasion.Attended constantly by a different gentleman, she was in the range of my vision wherever I turned--she kept repeating her picture in settings separated by such intervals that I wondered at the celerity with which she proceeded from spot to spot.She was never discernibly out of breath, though the associate of her ecstasy at the given moment might have been taken as being; and I kept getting afresh the impression which, the day before, had so promptly followed my arrival, the odd impression, as of something the matter with each party, that I had gathered, in the grounds, from the sight of her advance upon me with Obert.I had by this time of course made out--and it was absurd to shut my eyes to it--what THAT particular something, at least, was.It was that Obert had quickly perceived something to be the matter with HER, and that she, on her side, had become aware of his discovery.
I wondered hereupon if the discovery were inevitable for each gentleman in succession, and if this were their reason for changing so often.Did everyone leave her, like Obert, with an uneasy impression of her, and were these impressions now passed about with private hilarity or profundity, though without having reached me save from the source I have named? I affected myself as constantly catching her eye, as if she wished to call my attention to the fact of who was with her and who was not.I had kept my distance since our episode with the pastels, and yet nothing could more come home to me than that I had really not, since then, been absent from her.We met without talk, but not, thanks to these pointed looks, without contact.
I daresay that, for that matter, my cogitations--for I must have bristled with them--would have made me as stiff a puzzle to interpretative minds as I had suffered other phenomena to become to my own.I daresay I wandered with a tell-tale restlessness of which the practical detachment might well have mystified those who hadn't suspicions.Whenever I caught Mrs.Server's eye it was really to wonder how many suspicions SHE had.I came upon her in great dim chambers, and I came upon her before sweeps of view.I came upon her once more with the Comte de Dreuil, with Lord Lutley, with Ford Obert, with almost every other man in the house, and with several of these, as if there had not been enough for so many turns, two or three times over.
Only at no moment, whatever the favouring frame, did I come upon her with Gilbert Long.It was of course an anomaly that, as an easy accident, Iwas not again myself set in the favouring frame.That I consistently escaped being might indeed have been the meaning most marked in our mute recognitions.
