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By Root 7155 0

had more and more the effect of a signal communication that she had come, all responsibly and deliberately, as on the clear show of the clock-face of their situation, to make. The whole demonstration, none the less, presented itself as taking place at a very high level of debate – in the cool upper air of the finer discrimination, the deeper sincerity, the larger philosophy. No matter what were the facts invoked and arrayed, it was only a question as yet of their seeing their way together: to which indeed exactly the present occasion appeared to have so much to contribute. ‘It’s not that you haven’t my courage,’ Charlotte said, ‘but that you haven’t, I rather think, my imagination. Unless indeed it should turn out after all,’ she added, ‘that you haven’t even my intelligence. However, I shan’t be afraid of that till you’ve given me more proof.’ And she made again, but more clearly, her point of a moment before. ‘You knew besides, you knew to-day I’d come. And if you knew that you know everything.’ So she pursued, and if he didn’t meanwhile, if he didn’t even at this, take her up, it might be that she was so positively fitting him again with the fair face of temporising kindness that he had given her, to keep her eyes on, at the other important juncture, and the sense of which she might ever since had been carrying about with her like a precious medal – not exactly blessed by the Pope – suspended round her neck. She had come back, however this might be, to her immediate account of herself, and no mention of their great previous passage was to rise to the lips of either. ‘Above all,’ she said, ‘there has been the personal romance of it.’

‘Of tea with me over the fire? Ah so far as that goes. I don’t think even my intelligence fails me.’

‘Oh it’s further than that goes; and if I’ve had a better day than you it’s perhaps, when I come to think of it, that I am braver. You bore yourself, you see. But I don’t. I don’t, I don’t,’ she repeated.

‘It’s precisely boring one’s self without relief,’ he protested, ‘that takes courage.’

‘Passive then – not active. My romance is that, if you want to know, I’ve been all day on the town. Literally on the town – isn’t that what they call it? I know how it feels.’ After which, as if breaking off, ‘And you, have you never been out?’ she asked.

He still stood there with his hands in his pockets. ‘What should I have gone out for?’

‘Oh what should people in our case do anything for? But you’re wonderful, all of you – you know how to live. We’re clumsy brutes, we others, beside you – we must always be “doing” something. However,’ Charlotte pursued, ‘if you had gone out you might have missed the chance of me – which I’m sure, though you won’t confess it, was what you didn’t want; and might have missed above all the satisfaction that, look blank about it as you will, I’ve come to congratulate you on. That’s really what I can at last do. You can’t not know at least, on such a day as this – you can’t not know,’ she said, ‘where you are.’ She waited as for him either to grant he knew or pretend he didn’t; but he only drew a long deep breath which came out like a moan of impatience. It brushed aside the question of where he was or what he knew; it seemed to keep the ground clear for the question of his visitor herself, that of Charlotte Verver exactly as she sat there. So for some moments, with their long look, they but treated the matter in silence; with the effect indeed, by the end of the time, of having considerably brought it on. This was sufficiently marked in what Charlotte next said. ‘There it all is – extraordinary beyond words. It makes such a relation for us as, I verily believe, was never before in the world thrust upon two well-meaning creatures. Haven’t we therefore to take things as we find them?’ She put the question still more directly than that of a moment before, but to this one as well he returned no immediate answer. Noticing only that she had finished her tea he relieved her of her cup, carried it back to the table, asked her what more she would have; and then, on her ‘Nothing,