It made her, however, equally stare. "Why, isn't it the very thing you
maintained?"
I felt her dreadful logic, but I couldn't--with my exquisite image all
contrasted, as in a flash from flint, with this monstrosity--so much as
entertain her question. I could only stupidly again sound it. "Awfully
sharp?"
"You after all then now don't?" It was she herself whom the words at
present described! "Then what on earth _do_ you think?" The strange
mixture in my face naturally made her ask it, but everything, within a
minute, had somehow so given way under the touch of her supreme
assurance, the presentation of her own now finished system, that I dare
say I couldn't at the moment have in the least trusted myself to tell
her. She left me, however, in fact, small time--she only took enough,
with her negations arrayed and her insolence recaptured, to judge me
afresh, which she did as she gathered herself up into the strength of
twenty-five. I didn't after all--it appeared part of my smash--know the
weight of her husband's years, but I knew the weight of my own. They
might have been a thousand, and nothing but the sense of them would in a
moment, I saw, be left me. "My poor dear, you _are_ crazy, and I bid you
good-night!"
Nothing but the sense of them--on my taking it from her without a sound
and watching her, through the lighted rooms, retreat and
disappear--_was_ at first left me; but after a minute something else
came, and I grew conscious that her verdict lingered. She had so had the
last word that, to get out of its planted presence, I shook myself, as I
had done before, from my thought. When once I had started to my room
indeed--and to preparation for a livelier start as soon as the house
should stir again--I almost breathlessly hurried. Such a last word--the
word that put me altogether nowhere--was too unacceptable not to
prescribe afresh that prompt test of escape to other air for which I had
earlier in the evening seen so much reason. I _should_ certainly never
again, on the spot, quite hang together, even though it wasn't really
that I hadn't three times her method. What I too fatally lacked was her
tone.