“I believe sometimes we know a great deal more than we know we know,” he answered. “That sounds like some nonsense game with words, but it’s the best way to put it. Conscience seems to speak out of the silence. But there may be some one in the prompter’s box—our secret knowledge.”
“But is it knowledge of ourselves, or of others?”
“Which do you think?”
“Of ourselves, I suppose. I think we generally know far less of others than we believe ourselves to know.”
She expressed his thought of her earlier in the evening.
“Probably. And nevertheless we may know things of them that we are not aware we know—till after we have instinctively acted on our knowledge.”
Their eyes met again. Hermione felt in that moment as if he knew why she had given Vere the permission to read his books.
But still she did not know whether he had written that sentence in the book at Frisio’s carelessly, or prompted by some violent impulse to express a secret thought or feeling of the moment.
“Things good or evil?” she said, slowly.
“Perhaps both.”