"You do save me most things."
"I try," she said sweetly, "to save you all."
He smiled now. "There are limits," he said, "even to your power of
saving me. And to my capacity for being saved."
The words were charged with a significance that Brodrick himself was not
aware of; as if the powers that worked in him obscurely had used him for
the utterance of a divination not his own.
His secretary understood him better than he did himself. She had spent
three years in understanding him. And now, for the first time in three
years, her lucidity was painful.
She could not contemplate serenely the thing she thought she had seen.
Therefore she drew a veil over it and refused to believe that it was
there.
"He did not mean anything," said Gertrude to herself. "He is not the
sort of man who means things." Which was true.