and allowed for that misfortune; therefore when,
in talk with him, she was violent and almost un-
feminine, it was almost as if they had settled, for
intercourse, on the short cut of the fantastic and
the happy language of exaggeration. It had come
to be definite between them at a primary stage that,
if they could have no other straight way, the realm
of thought at least was open to them. They could
think whatever they liked about whatever they
would or, in other words, they could say it. Say
ing it for each other, for each other alone, only
of course added to the taste. The implication was
thereby constant that what they said when not to
gether had no taste for them at all, and nothing
could have served more to launch them, at special
hours, on their small floating island than such an
assumption that they were only making believe
everywhere else. Our young man, it must be added,
was conscious enough that it was Kate who profited
most by this particular play of the fact of intimacy.
It always seemed to him that she had more life
than he to react from, and when she recounted the
dark disasters of her house and glanced at the hard,
odd offset of her present exaltation since as exal
tation it was apparently to be considered he felt
his own grey domestic annals to make little show.
It was naturally, in all such reference, the question
of her father's character that engaged him most,
but her picture of her adventure in Chirk Street
gave him a sense of how little as yet that character

[[74]]

p073 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p074w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p075

v?