Page:The Sacred Fount (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901).djvu/156

 —for every hint of a perch that might still be held out? What could only, therefore, in the connection, strike me as indicated was fairly to put into her mouth—if one might do so without showing too ungracefully as alarmed—the words one might have guessed her to wish to use were she able to use any. It was a small service of anticipation that I tried to render her with as little of an air as possible of being remedial. "I daresay you wonder," I remarked on these lines, "why, at all, I should have thrust Brissenden in."

"Oh, I do so wonder!" she replied with the refined but exaggerated glee that is a frequent form in high companies and light colloquies. I did help her—it was admirable to feel it. She liked my imposing on her no more complex a proposition. She liked my putting the thing to her so much better than she could have put it to me. But she immediately afterwards looked away as if—now that we had put it, and it didn't matter which of us best—we had nothing more to do with it. She gave me a hint of drops and inconsequences that might indeed have opened up abysses, and all the while she smiled and smiled. Yet whatever she did or failed of, as I even then observed to myself, how she remained lovely! One's pleasure in that helped one somehow not to break down on one's own side—since breaking down was in question—for commiseration. I didn't know what she might have 150