Distinctly, he was uneasy--though as yet perhaps but vaguely--at what I
might be coming to. That was precisely my idea, and if I pitied him a
little for my pressure my idea was yet what most possessed me. "Do you
mean there's nothing in him that strikes you?"
On this, unmistakably, he looked at me hard. "'Strikes' me--in that boy?
Nothing in him, that I know of, ever struck me in my life. He's not an
object of the smallest interest to me!"
I felt that if I insisted I should really stir up the old Long, the
stolid coxcomb, capable of rudeness, with whose redemption,
reabsorption, supersession--one scarcely knew what to call it--I had
been so happily impressed. "Oh, of course, if you haven't noticed, you
haven't, and the matter I was going to speak of will have no point. You
won't know what I mean." With which I paused long enough to let his
curiosity operate if his denial had been sincere. But it hadn't. His
curiosity never operated. He only exclaimed, more indulgently, that he
didn't know what I was talking about; and I recognised after a little
that if I had made him, without intention, uncomfortable, this was
exactly a proof of his being what Mrs. Briss, at the station, had called
cleverer, and what I had so much remarked while, in the garden before
dinner, he held our small company. Nobody, nothing could, in the time of
his inanity, have made him turn a hair. It was the mark of his
aggrandisement. But I spared him--so far as was consistent with my wish
for absolute certainty; changed the subject, spoke of other things, took
pains to sound disconnectedly, and only after reference to several of
the other ladies, the name over which we had just felt friction. "Mrs.
Brissenden's quite fabulous."