did that she looked for a bench that was empty, es
chewing a still emptier chair that she saw hard by
and for which she would have paid, with superiority,
a fee.

The last scrap of superiority had soon enough left
her, if only because she before long knew herself for
more tired than she had proposed. This and the
charm, after a fashion, of the situation in itself made
her linger and rest; there was a sort of spell in the
sense that nobody in the world knew where she was.
It was the first time in her life that this had hap
pened; somebody, everybody appeared to have
known before, at every instant of it, where she was;
so that she was now suddenly able to put it to her
self that that hadn't been a life. This present kind
of thing therefore might be which was where pre
cisely her distinguished friend seemed to be wishing
her to come out. He wished her also, it was true,
not to make, as she was perhaps doing now, too much
of her isolation; at the same time however as he
clearly desired to deny her no decent source of in
terest. He was interested she arrived at that in
her appealing to as many sources as possible; and it
fairly filtered into her, as she sat and sat, that he was
essentially propping her up. Had she been doing it
herself she would have called it bolstering the bol
stering that was simply for the weak; and she
thought and thought as she put together the proofs
that it was as one of the weak he was treating her.
It was of course as one of the weak that she had gone

[[274]]

p273 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p274w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p275

v?