"That I've made up my mind?" She was positively free at last to enjoy my discomfort. "Wouldn't it be surely, if your ideas were worth anything, enough? But it isn't," she added, "only on that. It's on something else."
I had after an instant extracted from this the single meaning it could appear to yield. "I'm to understand that you know?"
"That they're intimate enough for anything?" She faltered, but she brought it out. "I know."
It was the oddest thing in the world for a little, the way this affected me without my at all believing it. It was preposterous, hang though it would with her somersault, and she had quite succeeded in giving it the note of sincerity. It was the mere sound of it that, as I felt even at the time, made it a little of a blow—a blow of the smart of which I was conscious just long enough inwardly to murmur: "What if she should be right?" She had for these seconds the advantage of stirring within me the memory of her having indeed, the day previous, at Paddington, "known" as I hadn't. It had been really on what she then knew that we originally started, and an element of our start had been that I admired her freedom. The form of it, at least—so beautifully had she recovered herself—was all there now. Well, I at any rate reflected, it wasn't the form that need trouble me, and I quickly enough put her a question that related only to the matter. "Of course if she is—it is smash!"
"And haven't you yet got used to its being?"
I kept my eyes on her; I traced the buried figure in the ruins. "She's good enough for a fool; and so"—I made it out—"is he! If he is the same ass—yes—they might be."
"And he is," said Mrs. Briss, "the same ass!"
I continued to look at her. "He would have no need then of her having transformed and inspired him."
"Or of her having deformed and idiotised herself," my friend subjoined.
Oh, how it sharpened my look! "No, no—she wouldn't need that."