The air of it held him. “Then you’ve all the while known—?”
“I’ve known nothing but what I’ve seen; and I wonder,” she declared with some impatience, “that you didn’t see as much. It was enough to be with him there—”
“In the box? Yes,” he rather blankly urged.
“Well—to feel sure.”
“Sure of what?”
She got up from her chair, at this, with a nearer approach than she had ever yet shown to dismay at his dimness. She even, fairly pausing for it, spoke with a shade of pity. “Guess!”
It was a shade, fairly, that brought a flush into his face; so that for a moment, as they waited together, their difference was between them. “You mean that just your hour with him told you so much of his story? Very good; I’m not such a fool, on my side, as that I don’t understand you, or as that I didn’t in some degree understand him. That he has done what he liked most isn’t, among any of us, a matter the least in dispute. There’s equally little question at this time of day of what it is he does like most. But I’m not talking,” he reasonably explained, “of any mere wretch he may still pick up. I’m talking of some person who in his present situation may have held her own, may really have counted.”
“That’s exactly what I am!” said Miss Gostrey. But she as quickly made her point. “I thought you thought—or that they think at Woollett—that that’s what mere wretches necessarily do. Mere wretches necessarily don’t!” she declared with spirit. “There must, behind every appearance to the contrary, still be somebody—somebody who’s not a mere wretch, since we accept the miracle. What else but such a somebody can such a miracle be?”
He took it in. “Because the fact itself is the woman?”
“A woman. Some woman or other. It’s one of the things that have to be.”