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."