THE SACRED FOUNT
We hovered so near the case of Mr. and Mrs. Brissenden that it positively excited me, and all the more for her sustained unconsciousness. "Oh, the man's not aware of his own change. He doesn't see it as we do. It's all to his advantage."
"But we see it to his advantage. How should that prevent?"
"We see it to the advantage of his mind and his talk, but not to that of———"
"Well, what?" I pressed as she pulled up.
She was thinking how to name such mysteries. "His delicacy. His consideration. His thought for her. He would think for her if he weren't selfish. But he is selfish—too much so to spare her, to be generous, to realise. It's only, after all," she sagely went on, feeding me again, as I winced to feel, with profundity of my own sort, "it's only an excessive case, a case that in him happens to show as what the doctors call 'fine,' of what goes on whenever two persons are so much mixed up. One of them always gets more out of it than the other. One of them—you know the saying—gives the lips, the other gives the cheek."
"It's the deepest of all truths. Yet the cheek profits too," I more prudently argued.
"It profits most. It takes and keeps and uses all the lips give. The cheek, accordingly," she continued to point out, "is Mr. Long's. The lips are what we began by looking for. We've found them.
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