"You have seemed a bit different lately.... What's up?" he demanded, looking squarely at me.
My plan, to which his last words gave a new and unexpected fillip, was briefly this:
When, over the case of reference books, I had heard Miss Windus make the very remark he also had just made—namely, that I had been "different"—I had had a swift access of alarm. In what particular I had betrayed myself I didn't know, but I realised very clearly, and doubly clearly now that the same remark had dropped from Archie himself, that love and a light cannot be hid, and that if my extreme former care had not secured me from remark no care I was likely to be able to take for the future would do so. I had laid myself open, and should do so again. How was I to cover myself?
I thought I saw my way. I invite you to consider that way.
Were I to give it out to Archie—or rather, not so much to give it out as allow a surmise to dawn on him—that my heart was already pre-engaged in some carefully unspecified quarter or other, not only would this "difference," both he and Miss Windus had remarked on, be admitted and accounted for, but I should at one stroke set myself free from a hundred other trammels of gossip, past, present and to come. After that avowal nothing I did would be unaccountable. I should have a definite place in the general sex-understanding. I should be classed, out of the running, filed and docketed, totally uninteresting to either Miss Windus or Miss Causton and rid of the attentions of Miss Levey.
And I should also—my heart had thrilled suddenly and poignantly as I thought of this—I should also be admitted at once to privileges. I should have my share in such freedoms and exemptions as the married man knows fully and the attached bachelor at least to a probationary extent. This state of things does by tacit acknowledgment exist. The man who can say all to one woman can say more than other men to all women. And the shining immunity I now saw before me would even include what so far I had had to deny myself—conversation, thus safeguarded, with Evie herself.
"By heaven!" my heart now cried within me, "I will do it!"
And instantly a perfect seething of the cautions and reserves with which I must do it sprang up in my brain.
But here was Archie patiently waiting for me to speak.
"What's up? What the dickens are you talking about?" he asked once more.