Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/18

 himself just now inflamed with a curiosity that might prove communicable.

The element of uncertainty at all events, such as it was, came largely from the late changes in her own condition; so far as it was not likewise distinguishably riper fruit of the impression in him, rather heavy from the first, of something that he could only call to himself her greater knowledge of life. He had already more than once had to take into account that of the two she had seen, as people said, much the most of the world; and she had not at present seen less of it for returning to America, after her husband's death in the south of Europe and on the admonition of still other circumstances that he divined as beyond his measure, with something of the large air of a public policy. Her departures, absences, returns, returns as for the purpose of intensifying fresh disappearances, these things were what had somehow caused her to glare at him, to dazzle and almost to blind him, as by a wider initiation. He had seen her thus only at certain points of her sustained revolution; had been ignorant of many things with which the cup of her own knowledge overflowed; had been in short indebted for the extent of his privilege to the mere drops and lapses in the general time, as he termed it, that she so insolently kept. Sharing continuously as a child, and then as a growing girl, the life led by her parents in other countries, she had had behind 4