THE SACRED FOUNT
for what might pass in sound. We looked at each other therefore with a strained smile over any question of identities. It was as if it had been one thing—to her confused, relaxed intensity—to give herself up to me, but quite another thing to give up somebody else.
And yet, superficially arrested as I was for the time, I directly afterwards recognised in this instinctive discrimination—the last, the expiring struggle of her native lucidity—a supremely convincing bit of evidence. It was still more convincing than if she had done any of the common things—stammered, changed colour, shown an apprehension of what the person named might have said to me. She had had it from me that he and I had talked about her, but there was nothing that she accepted the idea of his having been able to say. I saw—still more than this—that there was nothing to my purpose (since my purpose was to understand) that she would have had, as matters stood, coherence enough to impute to him. It was extremely curious to me to divine, just here, that she hadn't a glimmering of the real logic of Brissenden's happy effect on her nerves. It was the effect, as coming from him, that a beautiful delicacy forbade her as yet to give me her word for; and she was certainly herself in the stage of regarding it as an anomaly. Why, on the contrary, I might have wondered, shouldn't she have jumped at the chance, at the comfort, of seeing a preference
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