“Well, not only. I’m acting with a sense for him of other things too. Consideration and comfort and security—the general safety of being anchored by a strong chain. He wants, as I see him, to be protected. Protected I mean from life.”
“Ah voilà!”—her thought fitted with a click. “From life. What you really want to get him home for is to marry him.”
“Well, that’s about the size of it.”
“Of course,” she said, “it’s rudimentary. But to any one in particular?”
He smiled at this, looking a little more conscious. “You get everything out.”
For a moment again their eyes met. “You put everything in!”
He acknowledged the tribute by telling her. “To Mamie Pocock.”
She wondered; then gravely, even exquisitely, as if to make the oddity also fit: “His own niece?”
“Oh you must yourself find a name for the relation. His brother-in-law’s sister. Mrs. Jim’s sister-in-law.”
It seemed to have on Miss Gostrey a certain hardening effect. “And who in the world’s Mrs. Jim?”