"Do you call it getting on with her to be the more bewildered the more I
see her?"
"Isn't to say you're bewildered only, on the whole, to say you're
charmed? That always--doesn't it?--describes more or less any engrossed
relation with a lovely lady."
"Well, I'm not sure I'm so charmed." He spoke as if he had thought this
particular question over for himself; he had his way of being lucid
without brightness. "I'm not at all easily charmed, you know," he the
next moment added; "and I'm not a fellow who goes about much after
women."
"Ah, that I never supposed! Why in the world _should_ you? It's the last
thing!" I laughed. "But isn't this--quite (what shall one call it?)
innocently--rather a peculiar case?"
My question produced in him a little gesture of elation--a gesture
emphasised by a snap of his forefinger and thumb. "I knew you knew it
was special! I knew you've been thinking about it!"
"You certainly," I replied with assurance, "have, during the last five
minutes, made me do so with some sharpness. I don't pretend that I don't
now recognise that there _must_ be something the matter. I only
desire--not unnaturally--that there _should_ be, to put me in the right
for having thought, if, as you're so sure, such a freedom as that can be
brought home to me. If Mrs. Server is beautiful and gentle and
strange," I speciously went on, "what are those things but an
attraction?"
I saw how he had them, whatever they were, before him as he slowly shook
his head. "They're not an attraction. They're too queer."
I caught in an instant my way to fall in with him; and not the less that
I by this time felt myself committed, up to the intellectual eyes, to
ascertaining just _how_ queer the person under discussion might be. "Oh,
of course I'm not speaking of her as a party to a silly flirtation, or
an object of any sort of trivial pursuit. But there are so many
different ways of being taken."
"For a fellow like you. But not for a fellow like me. For me there's
only one."
"To be, you mean, in love?"