XIV

Summary

I HAD faced her again just in time to take it, and I immediately made up my mind how best to do so. “Then I go utterly to pieces!”

“You shouldn't have perched yourself,” she laughed—she could by this time almost coarsely laugh—“in such a preposterous place!”

“Ah, that's my affair,” I returned, “and if I accept the consequences I don't quite see what you’ve to say to it. That I do accept them—so far as I make them out as not too intolerable and you as not intending them to be—that I do accept them is what I’ve been trying to signify to you. Only my fall,” I added, “is an inevitable shock. You remarked to me a few minutes since that you didn't recover yourself in a flash. I differ from you, you see, in that I do; I take my collapse all at once. Here then I am. I’m smashed. I don't see, as I look about me, a piece I can pick up. I don't attempt to account for my going wrong; I don't attempt to account for yours with me; I don't attempt to account for anything. If Long is just what he always was it settles the matter, and the special clincher for us can be but your honest final impression, made precisely more aware of itself by repentance for the levity with which you had originally yielded to my contagion.”

She didn't insist on her repentance; she was too taken up with the facts themselves. “Oh, but add to my impression everyone else's impression! Has anyone noticed anything?”

“Ah, I don't know what anyone has noticed. I haven’t,” I brooded, “ventured— as you know—to ask anyone.”

“Well, if you had you’d have seen—seen, I mean, all they don't see. If they had been conscious they’d have talked.”

I thought. “To me?”

“Well, I’m not sure to you; people have such a notion of what you embroider on things that they’re rather afraid to commit themselves or to lead you on: they’re sometimes in, you know,” she luminously reminded me, “for more than they bargain for, than they quite know what to do with, or than they care to have on their hands.”