XI

Summary

I GAVE up by going, decidedly, to the smoking-room, where several men had gathered and where Obert, a little apart from them, was in charmed communion with the bookshelves. They are wonderful, everywhere, at Newmarch, the bookshelves, but he put a volume back as he saw me come in, and a moment later, when we were seated, I said to him again, as a recall of our previous passage, “Then you could tell what I was talking about!” And I added, to complete my reference, “Since you thought Mrs. Server was the person whom, when I stopped you, I was sorry to learn from you I had missed.”

His momentary silence appeared to admit the connection I established. “Then you find you have missed her? She wasn't there for you?”

“There's no one ‘there for me’; so that I fear that if you weren’t, as it happens, here for me, my amusement would be quite at an end. I had, in fact,” I continued, “already given it up as lost when I came upon you, a while since, in conversation with the lady we’ve named. At that, I confess, my prospects gave something of a flare. I said to myself that since your interest hadn't then wholly dropped, why, even at the worst, should mine? Yours was mine, wasn't it? for a little, this morning. Or was it mine that was yours? We exchanged, at any rate, some lively impressions. Only, before we had done, your effort dropped or your discretion intervened: you gave up, as none of your business, the question that had suddenly tempted us.”

“And you gave it up too,” said my friend.

“Yes, and it was on the idea that it was mine as little as yours that we separated.”

“Well then?” He kept his eyes, with his head thrown back, on the warm bindings, admirable for old gilt and old colour, that covered the opposite wall.

“Well then, if I’ve correctly gathered that you’re, in spite of our common renunciation, still interested, I confess to you that I am. I took my detachment too soon for granted. I haven't been detached. I’m not, hang me! detached now. And it's all because you were originally so suggestive.”