Our point is accordingly that he valued this character quite sufficiently to measure his present danger of letting it lapse, against which he promised himself to be much on his guard.He was quite ready, none the less, to be selfish just a little, since surely no more charming occasion for it had come to him."Just a little," in a word, was just as much as Mss Bartram, taking one day with another, would let him.He never would be in the least coercive, and would keep well before him the lines on which consideration for her--the very highest--ought to proceed.He would thoroughly establish the heads under which her affairs, her requirements, her peculiarities--he went so far as to give them the latitude of that name--would come into their intercourse.All this naturally was a sign of how much he took the intercourse itself for granted.There was nothing more to be done about that.It simply existed; had sprung into being with her first penetrating question to him in the autumn light there at Weatherend.The real form it should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form of their marrying.But the devil in this was that the very basis itself put marrying out of the question.His conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, in short, wasn't a privilege he could invite a woman to share; and that consequence of it was precisely what was the matter with him.Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching Beast in the Jungle.It signified little whether the crouching Beast were destined to slay him or to be slain.The definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn't cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt.Such was the image under which he had ended by figuring his life.
They had at first, none the less, in the scattered hours spent together, made no allusion to that view of it; which was a sign he was handsomely alert to give that he didn't expect, that he in fact didn't care, always to be talking about it.Such a feature in one's outlook was really like a hump on one's back.The difference it made every minute of the day existed quite independently of discussion.One discussed of course LIKE a hunchback, for there was always, if nothing else, the hunchback face.That remained, and she was watching him; but people watched best, as a general thing, in silence, so that such would be predominantly the manner of their vigil.Yet he didn't want, at the same time, to be tense and solemn; tense and solemn was what he imagined he too much showed for with other people.The thing to be, with the one person who knew, was easy and natural--to make the reference rather than be seeming to avoid it, to avoid it rather than be seeming to make it, and to keep it, in any case, familiar, facetious even, rather than pedantic and portentous.Some such consideration as the latter was doubtless in his mind for instance when he wrote pleasantly to Miss Bartram that perhaps the great thing he had so long felt as in the lap of the gods was no more than this circumstance, which touched him so nearly, of her acquiring a house in London.It was the first allusion they had yet again made, needing any other hitherto so little; but when she replied, after having given him the news, that she was by no means satisfied with such a trifle as the climax to so special a suspense, she almost set him wondering if she hadn't even a larger conception of singularity for him than he had for himself.He was at all events destined to become aware little by little, as time went by, that she was all the while looking at his life, judging it, measuring it, in the light of the thing she knew, which grew to be at last, with the consecration of the years, never mentioned between them save as "the real truth" about him.That had always been his own form of reference to it, but she adopted the form so quietly that, looking back at the end of a period, he knew there was no moment at which it was traceable that she had, as he might say, got inside his idea, or exchanged the attitude of beautifully indulging for that of still more beautifully believing him.
It was always open to him to accuse her of seeing him but as the most harmless of maniacs, and this, in the long run--since it covered so much ground--was his easiest description of their friendship.He had a screw loose for her but she liked him in spite of it and was practically, against the rest of the world, his kind wise keeper, unremunerated but fairly amused and, in the absence of other near ties, not disreputably occupied.The rest of the world of course thought him queer, but she, she only, knew how, and above all why, queer; which was precisely what enabled her to dispose the concealing veil in the right folds.She took his gaiety from him--since it had to pass with them for gaiety--as she took everything else; but she certainly so far justified by her unerring touch his finer sense of the degree to which he had ended by convincing her.SHE at least never spoke of the secret of his life except as "the real truth about you," and she had in fact a wonderful way of making it seem, as such, the secret of her own life too.That was in fine how he so constantly felt her as allowing for him; he couldn't on the whole call it anything else.
