The Sacred Fount

t of my extravagant perceptions in a glamour much more diffused. I remember feeling seriously warned, while dinner lasted, not to yield furt

at even the sense most finely poetic, aspiring to extract the moral, could scarce have helped feeling itself treated to something of the snub that affects — when it does affect — the uninvited reporter in whose face a door is closed. I said to myself during dinner that these were scenes in which a transcendent intelligence had after all no application, and that, in short, any preposterous acuteness might easily suffer among them such a loss of dignity as overtakes the newspap

she had quite done with me. It struck me that she felt she had done — that, as to the subject of our discussion, she deemed her case by this time so established as to offer comparatively little interest. I couldn’t come to her to renew the discussion; I could only come to her to make my submission; and it doubtless appeared to her — to do her justice — more delicate not to triumph over me in advance. The profession of joy, however, reigned in her handsome face none the less largely for my not having the benefit of it. If I seem to falsify my generalisation by acknowledging that her husband, on the same side, made no more public profes

on my left had given me a piece of news. I had asked her if she happened to know, as we couldn’t see, who was next Mrs. Server, and, though unable to say at the moment, she made no scruple, after a short interval, of ascertaining with the last directness. The stretch forward in which she had indulged, or the information she had caused to be passed up to her while I was again engaged on my right, established that it was Lord Lutley who had brought the lovely lady in and that it was Mr. Long who was on her other side. These things indeed were not the finest point of my companion’s communication, for I saw that what she felt I would be really interested in was the fact that Mr. Long had brought in Lady John, who was naturally, therefore, his o

erhaps not too much to say that I should scarce have been able to sit still at all but for the support afforded me by the oddity of the separation of Lord Lutley and Mrs. Froome; which, though resting on a general appearance directly opposed to that of my friends, offered somehow the relief of a suggestive analogy. What I could directly clutch at was that if the exception did prove the rule in the one case it might equally prove it in the other. If on a rare occ

was no simple spirit in which he could challenge me. It would have been simple of course to desire to knock me down, but that was barred by its being simple to excess. It wouldn’t even have been enough for him merely to ground it on a sudden fancy. It fitted, in fine, with my cogitations that it was so significant for him to wish to speak to me that I didn’t envy him his attempt at the particular shade of assurance required for carrying the thing off. He would have learned from Mrs. Server that I was not, as regarded them, at all as others were; and thus his idea, the fruit of that stimulation, could only be either to fathom, to felicitate, or — as it were — to destroy m

er produced. The elements that mingled in it scarce admit of discrimination. It was still more than previously a deep sense of being justified. My interlocutor was for those ten minutes immeasurably superior — superior, I mean, to himself — and he couldn’t possibly have become so save through the relation I had so patiently tracked. He faced me there with another light than his own, spoke with another sound, thought with another ease and understood with another ear. I should put it that what came up between us was the mere things of the occasion, were it not for the fine point to which, in my view, the things of th

closed — demanded and implied in its own intimate interest a certain amenity. Yes, accordingly, I had promptly got the answer that my wonder at his approach required: he had come to me for the high sport. He would formerly have been incapable of it, and he was beautifully capable of it now. It was precisely the kind of high sport — the play of perception, expression, sociability — in which Mrs. Server would a year or two before have borne as light a hand. I need scarcely add how little it would have found itself in that lady’s present chords. He had said to me in our ten minutes everything amusing she couldn’t have said. Y

any, we were considerably conscious of some experience, greater or smaller from one of us to the other, that had prepared us for the player’s spell. Felicitously scattered and grouped, we might in almost any case have had the air of looking for a message from it — of an imagination to be flattered, nerves to be quieted, sensibilities to be soothed. The whole scene was as composed as if there were scarce one of us but had a secret thirst for the infinite to be quenched. And it was the infinite that, for the hour, the distinguished foreigner poured out to us, causing it to roll in wonderful waves of sound, almost of colour, over our receptive attitudes and faces. Each of us, I think, n

ring away into the pleasant vague of everything else that didn’t matter,) for the so salient little figure of Mrs. Server, still the controlling image for me, the real principle of composition, in this affluence of fine things. What, for my part, while I listened, I most made out was the beauty and the terror of conditions so highly organised that under their rule her small lonely fight with disintegration could go on without the betrayal of a gasp or a shriek, and with no worse tell-tale contortion of lip or brow than the vibration, on its golden stem, of that constantly renewed flower of amenity which my observa

uld look at neither of these persons without a sharper sense of the contrast between the tragedy of their predicament and the comedy of the situation that did everything for them but suspect it. They had truly been arrayed and anointed, they had truly been isolated, for their sacrifice. I was sufficiently aware even then that if one hadn’t known it one might have seen nothing; but I was not less aware that one couldn’t know anything without seeing all; and so it was that, while our pianist played, my wandering vision played and played as well. It took in again, while it went from one of them to the other, the delicate light that each had shed on the other, and it made me wonder afresh what still more delicate support they themselves might not be in the very act of deriving from their dim community. It was for the glimmer of this support that I had left them together two

diately nearer. Lady John never did anything in silence, but she greeted me as I came up to them with a fine false alarm. “No, indeed,” she cried, “you shan’t carry him off this time!” — and poor Briss disappeared, leaving us face to face, even while she breathed defiance. He had made no joke of it, and I had from him no other recognition; it was therefore a mere touch, yet it gave me a sensible hint that he had begun, as things were going, to depend upon me, that I already in a fashion figured to him — and on amazingly little evidence after all — as his natural protector, his providence, his effective omniscience. Like Mrs. Server herself, he was materially on my hands, and it was proper I should “do” for him. I wondered if he were really beginning to look to me to

be what he has so eagerly g

icient to make her temporarily neglect the defence of the breach I had made in her consistency. “If you mean by ‘impressing upon’ her speaking to her, he hasn’t gone — you can see for yourself — t

understand that that’s not the way you sit with your friends. You steer admirably cl

as I do?” She thought it over. “But she does — to every

ection. “Do they co

it, they bump up against me in their flight, they don’t explain that by inti

you he

care not to suffer myself. I don’t

essing,” I ventured to ask, “

ar to, the imagination of atrocity. But I don’t pr

t at duplicity that has not even had the saving grace of success! Was it for Brissen

dnaturedly enough laughed. “But what,” she as

his term to the possibility of diffusion, because I suddenly found myself thinking with a kind of horror of any accident by which I might have to expose to the world, to defend against the world, to share with the world, that now so complex tangle of hypotheses that I have had for convenience to speak of as my theory. I could toss the ball myself, I could catch it and send it back, and familiarity had now made this exercise — in my own inner precincts — easy and safe. But the mere brush of Lady John’s clumsier curiosity made me tremble for the impunity of my creation. If there had been, so to speak, a discernment, however feeble, of my discernment, it would have been irresistible to me to take this as the menace of some incalculable cat

any man to make use of him quite so flagrantly. You don’t in the least flatter yourself that the poor fellow is in love with you — you wouldn’t care a bit if he were. Yet you’re willing to make him think you like him, so far as that may be necessary to explain your so frequently ingenious appropriation of him. He doesn’t like you too much, as yet; doesn’t even l

most of the more vulgar liabilities to offence. “Do I understa

f the idiots that we everyone of us are. I

ife? If you are” — and Lady John’s amusement took on a breadth — “you m

Do you mean because of his appa

d, “dallying a little, so far as that goes, with you? You’ve the tact to tell me that he doesn’t think me good enough, but I don’t require, do I? — for such a purpose as his — to be very extraordinarily good. You may say that you wrap it up immensely and try to sugar the dose! Well, all the same, give

portion as I felt how little she saw, think awfully well of myself, as we said at Newmarch, for seeing so much more? It comes back to me that the sense thus established of my superior vision may perfectly have gone a little to my head. If it was a frenzied fallacy I was all to blame, but if it was anything else whatever it was naturally intoxicating. I really remember in fact that nothing so much as this confirmed presumption of my impunity had appeared to me to mark the fine quality of my state. I think there must fairly have been a pitch at which I was not sure that not to partake of that state was, on the part of others, the

n continue to count on it? Or, if you object to my question in that form, is it not, frankly, to making his attitude — after all so thoroughly public — more convenient to each of you that (without perhaps quite measuring what you’re about,) you’ve gone on sacrificing poor Briss? I call it sacrificing, you see, in spite of there having been as yet no such great harm done. And if you ask me aga

e proof on Lady John’s part of a faculty that should have prevented my thinking of her

ation, my regret for the need of

vertheless look to me to satisfy you? Do you mean,” she pursued, “that you speak for persons whose

’t you guess,” I further risked, “who cons

ere was consistency enough in her wonder. “She has not been anything but nice to me; she’s not a person whose path one crosses without finding it out; an

d my logical interest lay moreover elsewhere. “Dear no! Mrs. Brissenden certainly feels her strength, and I should

tress stare. That is I was aware of nothing but that I had simultaneously myself been moved to some increase of sharpness. What could I have known that should have caused me to wonder at the momentary existence of this particular conjunction of minds unless it were simply the fact that I hadn’t seen it occur amid the many conjunctions I had already noticed — plus the fact that I had a few minutes before, in the interest of the full roundness of my theory, actually been missing it? These two persons had met in my presence at Paddington and had travelled together under my eyes; I had talked of Mrs. Briss with Long and of Long with Mrs. Briss; but the vivid picture that their social union forthwith presented stirred within me, though so strangely late in the day, it might have seemed, for such an emotion, more than enough fr

t at all in it — or not at all on that particular page; but my volume, none the less, was only waiting. What might be written there hummed already in my ears as a result of my mere glimpse. Had they also wonderfully begun to know? Had she, most wonderfully, and had they, in that case, prodigiously come together on it? This was a possibility into which my imagination could dip even deeper than into the depths over which it had conceived the other pair as hovering. These opposed couples balanced like bronze groups at the two ends of a chimney-piece, and the most I could say to myself in lucid deprecation of my thought was that I mustn’t take them equally for granted merely because they balanced. Things in the real had a way of not balancing; it was all an affair, this fine symmetry, of art

tically 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 wit

n 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

too commonplace for me to judge it useful to gather them in. She read all things, Lady John, heaven knows, in the light of the universal possibility of a “relation”; but most of the relations that she had up her sleeve could thrust themselves into my theory only to find themselves, the next minute, eliminated. They were of alien substance — insoluble in the whole. Gilbert Long had for her no connection, in my deeper sense, with Mrs. Server, nor Mrs. Server with Gilbert Long, nor the husband with the wife, nor the wife with the husband, nor I with either member of either pair, nor anyone with anything, nor anything with anyone. She was thus exactly where I wanted her to be, for, frankly, I became cons

mpression of a special order? What was to prove that there was “nothing in it” when two persons sat looking so very exceptionally much as if there were everything in it, as if they were for the first time — thanks to finer opportunity — doing each other full justice? Mustn’t it indeed at this juncture have come a little over my friend that Grace had lent herself with uncommon good nature, the previous afternoon, to the arrangement by which, on the way from town, her ladyship’s reputation was to profit by no worse company, precisely, than poor Briss’s? Mrs. Brissenden’s own was obviously now free to profit by my companion’s remembering — if the fact had reached her ears — that Mrs. Brissenden