THE SACRED FOUNT
would go as he used to go—naked and unashamed. No," I wound up, "he deals—turned out as we now see him—at another establishment."
"I'll grant it," said Mrs. Brissenden, "if you'll only name me the place."
Ah, I could still but laugh and resume! "He doesn't screen Lady John—she doesn't screen herself—with your husband or with anybody. It's she who's herself the screen! And pleased as she is at being so clever, and at being thought so, she doesn't even know it. She doesn't so much as suspect it. She's an unmitigated fool about it. 'Of course Mr. Long's clever, because he's in love with me and sits at my feet, and don't you see how clever I am? Don't you hear what good things I say—wait a little, I'm going to say another in about three minutes; and how, if you'll only give him time too, he comes out with them after me? They don't perhaps sound so good, but you see where he has got them. I'm so brilliant, in fine, that the men who admire me have only to imitate me, which, you observe, they strikingly do.' Something like that is all her philosophy."
My friend turned it over. "You do sound like her, you know. Yet how, if a woman's stupid———"
"Can she have made a man clever? She can't. She can't at least have begun it. What we shall know the real person by, in the case that you and
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