five minutes, something between them had well,
she couldn't call it anything but come. It was noth
ing, but it was somehow everything it was that
something for each of them had happened.

They had found themselves looking at each other
straight, and for a longer time on end than was
usual even at parties in galleries; but that, after all,
would have been a small affair, if there hadn't been
something else with it. It wasn t, in a word, sim
ply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs,
faculties, feelers had met as well, and when Kate
afterwards imaged to herself the sharp, deep fact
she saw it, in the oddest way, as a particular per
formance. She had observed a ladder against a
garden wall, and had trusted herself so to climb
it as to be able to see over into the probable garden
on the other side. On reaching the top she had
found herself face to face with a gentleman engaged
in a like calculation at the same moment, and the
two inquirers had remained confronted on their
ladders. The great point was that for the rest of
that evening they had been perched they had not
climbed down; and indeed, during the time that
followed, Kate at least had had the perched feeling
it was as if she were there aloft without a retreat.
A simpler expression of all this is doubtless but
that they had taken each other in with interest; and
without a happy hazard six months later the inci
dent would have closed in that account of it. The
accident, meanwhile, had been as natural as any-

[[60]]

p059 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p060w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p061

v?