He tried in a manner to oblige me. "To something else."
It seemed so, for my thought, the gleam of something that fitted, that I was almost afraid of quenching the gleam by pressure. I must then get everything I could from him without asking too much. "You don't quite know to what else?"
"No—I don't quite know." But there was a sound in it, this time, that I took as the hint of a wish to know—almost a recognition that I might help him.
I helped him accordingly as I could and, I may add, as far as the positive flutter he had stirred in me suffered. It fitted—it fitted! "If her change is to something other, I suppose then a change back is not quite the exact name for it."
"Perhaps not." I fairly thrilled at his taking the suggestion as if it were an assistance. "She isn't at any rate what I thought her yesterday."
It was amazing into what depths this dropped for me and with what possibilities it mingled. "I remember what you said of her yesterday."
I drew him on so that I brought back for him the very words he had used. "She was so beastly unhappy." And he used them now visibly not as a remembrance of what he had said, but for the contrast of the fact with what he at present perceived; so that the value this gave for me to what he at present perceived was immense.
"And do you mean that that's gone?"
He hung fire, however, a little as to saying so much what he meant, and while he waited he again looked at me. "What do you mean? Don't you think so yourself?"
I laid my hand on his arm and held him a moment with a grip that betrayed, I daresay, the effort in me to keep my thoughts together and lose not a thread. It betrayed at once, doubtless, the danger of that failure and the sharp foretaste of success. I remember that with it, absolutely, I struck myself as knowing again the joy of the intellectual mastery of things unamenable, that joy of determining, almost of creating results, which I have already mentioned as an exhilaration attached to some of my plunges of insight. "It would take long to tell you what I mean."