usual, instantly aware of the futility of any effort
to hold him to anything. He had written her that
he was ill, too ill to leave his room, and that he
must see her without delay; and if this had been,
as was probable, the sketch of a design, he was in
different even to the moderate finish required for
deception. He had clearly wanted, for perversities
that he called reasons, to see her, just as she herself
had sharpened for a talk; but she now again felt, in
the inevitability of the freedom he used with her,
all the old ache, her poor mother's very own, that
he couldn't touch you ever so lightly without set
ting up. No relation with him could be so short
or so superficial as not to be somehow to your hurt;
and this, in the strangest way in the world, not
because he desired it to be feeling often, as he
surely must, the profit for him of its not being
but because there was never a mistake for you that
he could leave unmade or a conviction of his im
possibility in you that he could approach you with
out strengthening. He might have awaited her on
the sofa in his sitting-room, or might have stayed
in bed and received her in that situation. She was
glad to be spared the sight of such penetralia, but
it would have reminded her a little less that there
was no truth in him. This was the weariness of
every fresh meeting; he dealt out lies as he might
the cards from the greasy old pack for the game
of diplomacy to which you were to sit down with
him. The inconvenience as always happens in

[[7]]

p006 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p007w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p008

v?