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This was the kind of thing that was in the air, whether he said it or not, and that could hang there even with such quite other things as more crudely came out; came in spite of its being perhaps calculated to strike us that these last would have been rather and most the unspoken and the indirect. They were Cornelia’s contribution, and as soon as she had begun to talk of Mrs. Worthingham–he didn’t begin it!–they had taken their place bravely in the centre of the circle. There they made, the while, their considerable little figure, but all within the ring formed by fifty other allusions, fitful but really intenser irruptions that hovered and wavered and came and went, joining hands at moments and whirling round as in chorus, only then again to dash at the slightly huddled centre with a free twitch or peck or push or other taken liberty, after the fashion of irregular frolic motions in a country dance or a Christmas game.

“You’re so in love with her and want to marry her!”–she said it all sympathetically and yearningly, poor crapy Cornelia; as if it were to be quite taken for granted that she knew all about it. And then when he had asked how she knew–why she took so informed a tone about it; all on the wonder of her seeming so much more “in” it just at that hour than he himself quite felt he could figure for: “Ah, how but from the dear lovely thing herself? Don’t you suppose she knows it?”

“Oh, she absolutely ‘knows’ it, does she?”–he fairly heard himself ask that; and with the oddest sense at once of sharply wanting the certitude and yet of seeing the question, of hearing himself say the words, through several thicknesses of some wrong medium. He came back to it from a distance; as he would have had to come back (this was again vivid to him) should he have got round again to his ripe intention three days before–after his now present but then absent friend, that is, had left him planted before his now absent but then present one for the purpose. “Do you mean she–at all confidently!–expects?” he went on, not much minding if it couldn’t but sound foolish; the time being given it for him meanwhile by the sigh, the wondering gasp, all charged with the unutterable, that the tone of his appeal set in motion. He saw his companion look at him, but it might have been with the eyes of thirty years ago; when–very likely.–he had put her some such question about some girl long since dead. Dimly at first, then more distinctly, didn’t it surge back on him for the very strangeness that there had been some such passage as this between them–yes, about Mary Cardew!–in the autumn of ’68?

“Why, don’t you realise your situation?” Miss Rasch struck him as quite beautifully wailing–above all to such an effect of deep interest, that is, on her own part and in him.

“My situation?”–he echoed, he considered; but reminded afresh, by the note of the detached, the far-projected in it, of what he had last remembered of his sentient state on his once taking ether at the dentist’s.

“Yours and hers–the situation of her adoring you. I suppose you at least know it,” Cornelia smiled.

Yes, it was like the other time and yet it wasn’t. She was like–poor Cornelia was–everything that used to be; that somehow was most definite to him. Still he could quite reply “Do you call it–her adoring me–my situation?”

“Well, it’s a part of yours, surely–if you’re in love with her.”

“Am I, ridiculous old person! in love with her?” White-Mason asked.

“I may be a ridiculous old person,” Cornelia returned–“and, for that matter, of course I am! But she’s young and lovely and rich and clever: so what could be more natural?”

“Oh, I was applying that opprobrious epithet–!” He didn’t finish, though he meant he had applied it to himself. He had got up from his seat; he turned about and, taking in, as his eyes also roamed, several objects in the room, serene and sturdy, not a bit cheap-looking, little old New York objects of ’68, he made, with an inner art, as if to recognise them–made so, that is, for himself; had quite the sense for the moment of asking them, of imploring them, to recognise him, to be for him things of his own past. Which they truly were, he could have the next instant cried out; for it meant that if three or four of them, small sallow carte-de-visite photographs, faithfully framed but spectrally faded, hadn’t in every particular, frames and balloon skirts and false “property” balustrades of unimaginable terraces and all, the tone of time, the secret for warding and easing off the perpetual imminent ache of one’s protective scowl, one would verily but have to let the scowl stiffen, or to take up seriously the question of blue goggles, during what might remain of life.