"Ah," I sighed, "I see you don't! What can I do," I asked, "to prove
it?"
"You can easily prove it. You can let me go."
"Does it strike you," I considered, "that I should take your going as a
sign of your belief?"
"Of what else, then?"
"Why, surely," I promptly replied, "my assent to your leaving our
discussion where it stands would constitute a very different symptom.
Wouldn't it much rather represent," I inquired, "a failure of belief on
my own part in _your_ honesty? If you can judge me, in short, as only
pretending----"
"Why shouldn't you," she put in for me, "also judge _me_? What have I to
gain by pretending?"
"I'll tell you," I returned, laughing, "if you'll tell me what _I_
have."
She appeared to ask herself if she could, and then to decide in the
negative. "If I don't understand you in any way, of course I don't in
that. Put it, at any rate," she now rather wearily quavered, "that one
of us has as little to gain as the other. I believe you," she repeated.
"There!"
"Thanks," I smiled, "for the way you say it. If you don't, as you say,
understand me," I insisted, "it's because you think me crazy. And if you
think me crazy I don't see how you _can_ leave me."
She presently met this. "If I believe you're sincere in saying you give
up I believe you've recovered. And if I believe you've recovered I don't
think you crazy. It's simple enough."
"Then why isn't it simple to understand me?"
She turned about, and there were moments in her embarrassment, now, from
which she fairly drew beauty. Her awkwardness was somehow noble; her
sense of her predicament was in itself young. "Is it _ever_?" she
charmingly threw out.
I felt she must see at this juncture how wonderful I found her, and even
that that impression--one's whole consciousness of her personal
victory--was a force that, in the last resort, was all on her side. "It
was quite worth your while, this sitting up to this hour, to show a
fellow how you bloom when other women are fagged. If that was really,
with the truth that we're so pulling about laid bare, what you did most
want to show, why, then, you've splendidly triumphed, and I congratulate
and thank you. No," I quickly went on, "I daresay, to do you justice,
the interpretation of my tropes and figures _isn't_ 'ever' perfectly
simple. You doubtless _have_ driven me into a corner with my dangerous
explosive, and my only fair course must be therefore to sit on it till
you get out of the room. I'm sitting on it now; and I think you'll find
you can get out as soon as you've told me _this_. Was the moment your
change of view dawned upon you the moment of our exchanging a while
ago, in the drawing-room, our few words?"
The light that, under my last assurances, had so considerably revived
faded in her a little as she saw me again tackle the theme of her
inconstancy; but the prospect of getting rid of me on these terms made
my inquiry, none the less, worth trying to face. "That moment?" She
showed the effort to think back.
I gave her every assistance. "It was when, after the music, I had been
talking to Lady John. You were on a sofa, not far from us, with Gilbert
Long; and when, on Lady John's dropping me, I made a slight movement
toward you, you most graciously met it by rising and giving me a chance
while Mr. Long walked away."
It was as if I had hung the picture before her, so that she had fairly
to look at it. But the point that she first, in her effort, took up was
not, superficially, the most salient. "Mr. Long walked away?"
"Oh, I don't mean to say that that had anything to do with it."