"And do you hear it?"
"What they suffer? No, I've taken care not to suffer myself. I don't listen. It's none of my business."
"Is that a way of gently expressing," I ventured to ask, "that it's also none of mine?"
"It might be," she replied, "if I had, as you appear to, the imagination of atrocity. But I don't pretend to so much as conceive what's your business."
"I wonder if it isn't just now," I said after a moment, "to convict you of an attempt at duplicity that has not even had the saving grace of success! Was it for Brissenden himself that you spoke just now as if you believed him to wish to cling to you?"
"Well, I'm kind enough for anything," she goodnaturedly enough laughed. "But what," she asked more sharply, "are you trying to find out?"
Such an awful lot, the answer to this would politely have been, that I daresay the aptness of the question produced in my face a shade of embarrassment. I felt, however, the next moment that I needn't fear too much. What I, on approaching Lady John, had found myself moved to test, using her in it as a happy touchstone, was the degree of the surrounding, the latent, sense of things: an impulse confirmed by the manner in which she had momentarily circled about the phenomenon of Mrs. Server's avidity, about the mystery of the terms made with it by our friend. It was present to me that if I could catch, on the part of my interlocutress, anything of a straight scent, I might take that as the measure of a diffused danger. I mentally applied this term to the possibility of diffusion, because I suddenly found myself thinking with a kind of horror of any accident by which I might have to expose to the world, to defend against the world, to share with the world, that now so complex tangle of hypotheses that I have had for convenience to speak of as my theory. I could toss the ball myself, I could catch it and send it back, and familiarity had now made this exercise—in my own inner precincts—easy and safe. But the mere brush of Lady John's clumsier curiosity made me tremble for the impunity of my creation. If there had been, so to speak, a discernment, however feeble, of my discernment, it would have been irresistible to me to take this as the menace of some incalculable catastrophe or some public ugliness. It wasn't for me definitely to image the logical result of a verification by the sense of others of the matter of my vision; but the thing had only to hang before me as a chance for me to feel that I should utterly object to it, though I may appear to weaken this statement if I add that the opportunity to fix the degree of my actual companion's betrayed mystification was almost a spell. This, I conceive, was just by reason of what was at stake. How could I happily tell her what I was trying to find out?—tell her, that is, not too much for security and yet enough for relief? The best answer seemed a brave jump. I was conscious of a certain credit open with her in my appearance of intellectual sympathy.
"Well," I brought out at last, "I'm quite aching to ask you if you'll forgive me a great liberty, which I owe to your candid challenge my opportunity to name. Will you allow me to say frankly that I think you play a dangerous game with poor Briss, in whom I confess I'm interested? I don't of course speak of the least danger to yourself; but it's an injustice to any man to make use of him quite so flagrantly. You don't in the least flatter yourself that the poor fellow is in love with you—you wouldn't care a bit if he were. Yet you're willing to make him think you like him, so far as that may be necessary to explain your so frequently ingenious appropriation of him. He doesn't like you too much, as yet; doesn't even like you quite enough. But your potency may, after all, work on him, and then, as your interest is so obviously quite elsewhere, what will happen will be that you'll find, to your inconvenience, that you've gone too far. A man never likes a woman enough unless he likes her more than enough. Unfortunately it's what the inveterate ass is sure sooner or later to do."
Lady John looked just enough interested to look detached from most of the more vulgar liabilities to offence. "Do I understand that to be the pretty name by which you describe Mr. Briss?"
"He has his share of it, for I'm thinking of the idiots that we everyone of us are. I throw out a warning against a contingency."