fact if she could talk of damnation: that she could
believe herself to have caught him in the act of irrel
evantly liking her. She hadn't gone to him to be
liked, she had gone to him to be judged; and he was
quite a great enough man to be in the habit, as a
rule, of observing the difference. She could like
him, as she distinctly did that was" another matter;
all the more that her doing so was now, so obviously
for herself, compatible with judgment. Yet it
would have been all portentously mixed had not, as
we say, a final, merciful wave, chilling rather, but
washing clear, come to her assistance.

It came, of a sudden, when all other thought was
spent. She had been asking herself why, if her case
was grave and she knew what she meant by that
he should have talked to her at all about what she
might with futility " do "; or why on the other
hand, if it were light, he should attach an importance
to the office of friendship. She had him, with her
little lonely acuteness as acuteness went during the
dog-days in the Regent's Park in a cleft stick: she
either mattered, and then she was ill; or she didn't
matter, and then she was well enough. Now he was
"acting," as they said at home, as if she did matter
until he should prove the contrary. It was too
evident that a person at his high pressure must keep
his inconsistencies, which were probably his highest
amusements, only for the very greatest occasions.
Her prevision, in fine, of just where she should catch
him furnished the light of that judgment in which

[[276]]

p275 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p276w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p277

v?