It seemed so, for my thought, the gleam of something that fitted, that I
was almost afraid of quenching the gleam by pressure. I must then get
everything I could from him without asking too much. "You don't quite
know to _what_ else?"
"No--I don't quite know." But there was a sound in it, this time, that I
took as the hint of a wish to know--almost a recognition that I might
help him.
I helped him accordingly as I could and, I may add, as far as the
positive flutter he had stirred in me suffered. It fitted--it fitted!
"If her change is to something other, I suppose then a change back is
not quite the exact name for it."
"Perhaps not." I fairly thrilled at his taking the suggestion as if it
were an assistance. "She isn't at any rate what I thought her
yesterday."
It was amazing into what depths this dropped for me and with what
possibilities it mingled. "I remember what you said of her yesterday."
I drew him on so that I brought back for him the very words he had used.
"She was so beastly unhappy." And he used them now visibly not as a
remembrance of what he had said, but for the contrast of the fact with
what he at present perceived; so that the value this gave for me to what
he at present perceived was immense.
"And do you mean that that's gone?"
He hung fire, however, a little as to saying so much what he meant, and
while he waited he again looked at me. "What do _you_ mean? Don't you
think so yourself?"
I laid my hand on his arm and held him a moment with a grip that
betrayed, I daresay, the effort in me to keep my thoughts together and
lose not a thread. It betrayed at once, doubtless, the danger of that
failure and the sharp foretaste of success. I remember that with it,
absolutely, I struck myself as knowing again the joy of the intellectual
mastery of things unamenable, that joy of determining, almost of
creating results, which I have already mentioned as an exhilaration
attached to some of my plunges of insight. "It would take long to tell
you what I mean."
The tone of it made him fairly watch me as I had been watching him.
"Well, haven't we got the whole night?"
"Oh, it would take more than the whole night--even if we had it!"
"By which you suggest that we haven't it?"
"No--we haven't it. I want to get away."
"To go to bed? I thought you were so keen."
"I _am_ keen. Keen is no word for it. I don't want to go to bed. I want
to get away."
"To leave the house--in the middle of the night?"
"Yes--absurd as it may seem. You excite me too much. You don't know what
you do to me."
He continued to look at me; then he gave a laugh which was not the
contradiction, but quite the attestation, of the effect produced on him
by my grip. If I had wanted to hold him I held him. It only came to me
even that I held him too much. I felt this in fact with the next thing
he said. "If you're too excited, then, to be coherent now, will you tell
me to-morrow?"
I took time myself now to relight. Ridiculous as it may sound, I had my
nerves to steady; which is a proof, surely, that for real excitement
there are no such adventures as intellectual ones. "Oh, to-morrow I
shall be off in space!"
"Certainly we shall neither of us be here. But can't we arrange, say, to
meet in town, or even to go up together in such conditions as will
enable us to talk?"
I patted his arm again. "Thank you for your patience. It's really good
of you. Who knows if I shall be alive to-morrow? We _are_ meeting. We
_do_ talk."
But with all I had to think of I must have fallen, on this, into the
deepest of silences, for the next thing I remember is his returning: "We
don't!" I repeated my gesture of reassurance, I conveyed that I should
be with him again in a minute, and presently, while he gave me time, he
came back to something of his own. "My wink, at all events, would have
been nothing for any question between us, as I've just said, without
yours. That's what I call your responsibility. It was, as we put the
matter, the torch of your analogy----"
"Oh, the torch of my analogy!"
I had so groaned it--as if for very ecstasy--that it pulled him up, and
I could see his curiosity as indeed reaffected. But he went on with a
coherency that somewhat admonished me: "It was your making me, as I told
you this morning, think over what you had said about Brissenden and his
wife: it was _that_----"
"That made you think over"--I took him straight up--"what you yourself
had said about our troubled lady? Yes, precisely. That _was_ the torch
of my analogy. What I showed you in the one case seemed to tell you what
to look for in the other. You thought it over. I accuse you of nothing
worse than of _having_ thought it over. But you see what thinking it
over does for it."
The way I said this appeared to amuse him. "I see what it does for
_you_!"
"No, you don't! Not at all yet. That's just the embarrassment."
"Just whose?" If I had thanked him for his patience he showed that he
deserved it. "Just yours?"
"Well, say mine. But when you do----!" And I paused as for the rich
promise of it.
"When I do see where you are, you mean?"
"The only difficulty is whether you _can_ see. But we must try. You've
set me whirling round, but we must go step by step. Oh, but it's all in
your germ!"--I kept that up. "If she isn't now beastly unhappy----"
"She's beastly happy?" he broke in, getting firmer hold, if not of the
real impression he had just been gathering under my eyes, then at least
of something he had begun to make out that my argument required. "Well,
that _is_ the way I see her difference. Her difference, I mean," he
added, in his evident wish to work with me, "her difference from her
other difference! There!" He laughed as if, also, he had found himself
fairly fantastic. "Isn't _that_ clear for you?"
"Crystalline--for _me_. But that's because I know why."
I can see again now the long look that, on this, he gave me. I made out
already much of what was in it. "So then do I!"
"But how in the world----? I know, for myself, _how_ I know."
"So then do I," he after a moment repeated.
"And can you tell me?"
"Certainly. But what I've already named to you--the torch of your
analogy."
I turned this over. "You've made evidently an admirable use of it. But
the wonderful thing is that you seem to have done so without having all
the elements."