"But, my dear lady," I protested, "nothing at all first marked her for me. She isn't marked for me, first or last. It was only you who so jumped at her."
My interlocutress stared, and I had at this moment, I remember, an almost intolerable sense of her fatuity and cruelty. They were all unconscious, but they were, at that stage, none the less irritating. Her fine bosom heaved, her blue eyes expanded with her successful, her simplified egotism. I couldn't, in short, I found, bear her being so keen about Mrs. Server while she was so stupid about poor Briss. She seemed to recall to me nobly the fact that she hadn't a lover. No, she was only eating poor Briss up inch by inch, but she hadn't a lover. "I don't," I insisted, "see in Mrs. Server any of the right signs."
She looked almost indignant. "Even after your telling me that you see in Lady John only the wrong ones?"
"Ah, but there are other women here than Mrs. Server and Lady John."
"Certainly. But didn't we, a moment ago, think of them all and dismiss them? If Lady John's out of the question, how can Mrs. Server possibly not be in it? We want a fool——"
"Ah, do we?" I interruptingly wailed.
"Why, exactly by your own theory, in which you've so much interested me! It was you who struck off the idea."
"That we want a fool?" I felt myself turning gloomy enough. "Do we really want anyone at all?"
She gave me, in momentary silence, a strange smile. "Ah, you want to take it back now? You're sorry you spoke. My dear man, you may be——" but that didn't hinder the fact, in short, that I had kindled near me a fine, if modest and timid, intelligence. There did remain the truth of our friend's striking development, to which I had called her attention. Regretting my rashness didn't make the prodigy less. "You'll lead me to believe, if you back out, that there's suddenly someone you want to protect. Weak man," she exclaimed with an assurance from which, I confess, I was to take alarm, "something has happened to you since we separated! Weak man," she repeated with dreadful gaiety, "you've been squared!"
I literally blushed for her. "Squared?"