it wouldn't do. It would be too bad a case. There's everything to make it so. They must live on pins and needles. Anything proved would go tremendously hard for her."
"In spite of which you're surprised that I 'protect' her?"
It was a question, however, that my companion could meet. "From people in general, no. From me in particular, yes."
In justice to Mrs. Brissenden I thought a moment. "Well, then, let us be fair all round. That you don't, as you say, breathe is a discretion I appreciate; all the more that a little inquiry, tactfully pursued, would enable you to judge whether any independent suspicion does attach. A little loose collateral evidence might be picked up; and your scorning to handle it is no more than I should, after all, have expected of you."
"Thank you for 'after all'!" My companion tossed her head. "I know for myself what I scorn to handle. Quite apart from that there's another matter. You must have noticed yourself that when people are so much liked–"
"There's a kind of general, amiable consensus of blindness? Yes—one can think of cases. Popularity shelters and hallows—has the effect of making a good-natured world agree not to see."
My friend seemed pleased that I so sufficiently understood. "This evidently has been a case then in which it has not only agreed not to see, but agreed not even to look. It has agreed in fact to look straight the other way. They say there's no smoke without fire, but it appears there may be fire without smoke. I'm satisfied, at all events, that one wouldn't in connection with these two find the least little puff. Isn't that just what makes the magnificence of their success—the success that reduces us to playing over them with mere moonshine?" She thought of it; seemed fairly to envy it. "I've never seen such luck!"
"A rare case of the beauty of impunity as impunity?" I laughed. "Such a case puts a price on passions otherwise to be deprecated? I'm glad indeed you admit we're 'reduced.' We are reduced. But what I meant to say just now was that if you'll continue to join in the genial conspiracy while I do the same—each of us making an exception only for the other—I'll pledge myself absolutely to the straight course. If before we separate I've seen reason to change my mind, I'll loyally let you know."
"What good will that do me," she asked, "if you don't change your mind? You won't change it if you shut your eyes to her."
"Ah, I feel I can't do that now. I am interested. The proof of that is," I pursued, "that I appeal to you for another impression of your own. I still don't see the logic of her general importunity."
"The logic is simply that she has a terror of appearing to encourage anyone in particular."
"Why then isn't it in her own interest, for the sake of the screen, just to do that? The appearance of someone in particular would be exactly the opposite of the appearance of Long. Your own admission is that that's his line with Lady John."
Mrs. Brissenden took her view. "Oh, she doesn't want to do anything so like the real thing. And, as for what he does, they don't feel in the same way. He's not nervous."
"Then why does he go in for a screen?"
"I mean"—she readily modified it—"that he's not so nervous as May. He hasn't the same reasons for panic. A man never has. Besides, there's not so much in Mr. Long to show–"
"What, by my notion, has taken place? Why not, if it was precisely by the change in him that my notion was inspired? Any change in her I know comparatively little about."
We hovered so near the case of Mr. and Mrs. Brissenden that it positively excited me, and all the more for her sustained unconsciousness. "Oh, the man's not aware of his own change. He doesn't see it as we do. It's all to his advantage."
"But we see it to his advantage. How should that prevent?"
"We see it to the advantage of his mind and his talk, but not to that of–"
"Well, what?" I pressed as she pulled up.
She was thinking how to name such mysteries. "His delicacy. His consideration. His thought for her. He would think for her if he weren't selfish. But he is selfish—too much so to spare her, to be generous, to realise. It's only, after all," she sagely went on, feeding me again, as I winced to feel, with profundity of my own sort, "it's only an excessive case, a case that in him happens to show as what the doctors call 'fine,' of what goes on whenever two persons are so much mixed up. One of them always gets more out of it than the other. One of them—you know the saying—gives the lips, the other gives the cheek."
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