Any reference, I saw, would have been difficult to ME, had I unluckily been forced to approach her.What would have made the rare delicacy of the problem was that blankness itself was the most direct reference of all.I had, however, as I passed her by, a comprehension as inward as that with which I had watched Mrs.Briss's retreat."WHAT shall I see when Inext see you?" was what I had mutely asked of Mrs.Briss; but "God grant I don't see YOU again at all!" was the prayer sharply determined in my heart as I left Mrs.Server behind me.I left her behind me for ever, but the prayer has not been answered.I did see her again; I see her now; Ishall see her always; I shall continue to feel at moments in my own facial muscles the deadly little ache of her heroic grin.With this, however, I was not then to reckon, and my simple philosophy of the moment could be but to get out of the room.The result of that movement was that, two minutes later, at another doorway, but opening this time into a great corridor, I found myself arrested by a combination that should really have counted for me as the least of my precious anomalies, but that--as accident happened to protect me--I watched, so long as I might, with intensity.I should in this connection describe my eyes as yet again engaging the less scrutable side of the human figure, were it not that poor Briss's back, now presented to me beside his wife's--for these were the elements of the combination--had hitherto seemed to me the most eloquent of his aspects.It was when he presented his face that he looked, each time, older; but it was when he showed you, from behind, the singular stoop of his shoulders, that he looked oldest.
They had just passed the door when I emerged, and they receded, at a slow pace and with a kind of confidential nearness, down the long avenue of the lobby.Her head was always high and her husband's always low, so that I couldn't be sure--it might have been only my fancy--that the contrast of this habit was more marked in them than usual.If I had known nothing about them I should have just unimaginatively said that talk was all on one side and attention all on the other.I, of course, for that matter, DID know nothing about them; yet I recall how it came to me, as my extemporised shrewdness hung in their rear, that I mustn't think anything too grossly simple of what might be taking place between them.My position was, in spite of myself, that of my having mastered enough possibilities to choose from.If one of these might be--for her face, in spite of the backward cock of her head, was turned to him--that she was looking her time of life straight AT him and yet making love to him with it as hard as ever she could, so another was that he had been already so thoroughly got back into hand that she had no need of asking favours, that she was more splendid than ever, and that, the same poor Briss as before his brief adventure, he was only feeling afresh in his soul, as a response to her, the gush of the sacred fount.Presumptuous choice as to these alternatives failed, on my part, in time, let me say, to flower; it rose before me in time that, whatever might be, for the exposed instant, the deep note of their encounter, only one thing concerned me in it: its being wholly their own business.
So for that I liberally let it go, passing into the corridor, but proceeding in the opposite sense and aiming at an issue which I judged I should reach before they would turn in their walk.I had not, however, reached it before I caught the closing of the door furthest from me; at the sound of which I looked about to find the Brissendens gone.They had not remained for another turn, but had taken their course, evidently, back to the principal drawing-room, where, no less presumably, the procession of the ladies bedward was even then forming.Mrs.Briss would fall straight into it, and I HADaccordingly lost her.I hated to appear to pursue her, late in the day as it may appear to affirm that I put my dignity before my curiosity.
Free again, at all events, to wait or to wander, I lingered a minute where I had stopped--close to a wide window, as it happened, that, at this end of the passage, stood open to the warm darkness and overhung, from no great height, one of the terraces.The night was mild and rich, and though the lights within were, in deference to the temperature, not too numerous, I found the breath of the outer air a sudden corrective to the grossness of our lustre and the thickness of our medium, our general heavy humanity.I felt its taste sweet, and while I leaned for refreshment on the sill I thought of many things.One of those that passed before me was the way that Newmarch and its hospitalities were sacrificed, after all, and much more than smaller circles, to material frustrations.We were all so fine and formal, and the ladies in particular at once so little and so much clothed, so beflounced yet so denuded, that the summer stars called to us in vain.We had ignored them in our crystal cage, among our tinkling lamps; no more free really to alight than if we had been dashing in a locked railway-train across a lovely land.I remember asking myself if I mightn't still take a turn under them, and I remember that on appealing to my watch for its sanction I found midnight to have struck.That then was the end, and my only real alternatives were bed or the smoking-room.The difficulty with bed was that I was in no condition to sleep, and the difficulty about rejoining the men was that--definitely, yes--there was one of them I desired not again to see.I felt it with sharpness as I leaned on the sill; I felt it with sadness as I looked at the stars; I felt once more what I had felt on turning a final back five minutes before, so designedly, on Mrs.Server.
