Tanqueray had hardly introduced them before he was called off to the doctor. He must leave them, he said, to each other.
They did not talk. They sat in an odd, intuitive silence, a silence that had no awkwardness and no embarrassment. It was intimate, rather, and vividly revealing. You would have said, coming upon them there, that they had agreed upon this form of communion and enjoyed it.
It gave her leisure in which to take him more securely in. Her gaze was obliquely attentive to his face, rugged and battered by travel, sallow now, where it had once been bronze. She saw that his soul had passed through strange climates.
It was borne in on her, as they continued in their silence, that she knew something about him, something certain and terrible, something that must, ultimately and inevitably, happen to him. She caught herself secretly defining it. Tuberculosis—that was it; that was the certain and inevitable thing. Of course; anybody would have seen it. That she had not seen it at the first glance she attributed to the enchantment of his personality that held her from any immediate consideration of his singular physique. If it were not, indeed, his own magnificent oblivion. When she looked, she could see how lean he was, how insufficiently nourished. His clothes hung on him in folds; they were worn to an incredible shabbiness. Yet he carried them with an indomitable distinction. He had the grace, in flank and limb, of the wild thing made swift by hunger.
Her seeing all this now made their silence unendurable. It also suggested the thing she at last said.
"I'm distressed about Mrs. Tanqueray. I hope it's nothing serious."
Prothero's face was serious; more serious by far than Tanqueray's had been.
"Too much contemplation," he said, "is bad for her. She isn't cut out for a contemplative, though she's in a fair way of becoming a saint and——"
She filled his blank, "And a martyr?"
"What can you expect when a man mates like that?"