This came out so straight that he saw at once how much truth it expressed; yet it was truth that still a little puzzled him. "But did you ever like knocking about in such discomfort?"
"It seems to me now that I then liked everything. It's the charm, at any rate," she said from her place at the fire, "of trying again the old feelings. They come back--they come back. Everything," she went on, "comes back. Besides," she wound up, "you know for yourself."
He stood near her, his hands in his pockets; but not looking at her, looking hard at the tea-table. "Ah I have n't your courage. Moreover," he laughed, "it seems to me that so far as that goes I do live in hansoms.
But you must awfully want your tea," he quickly added; "so let me give you a good stiff cup."
He busied himself with this care, and she sat down, on his pushing up a low seat, where she had been standing; so that while she talked he could bring her what she further desired. He moved to and fro before her, he helped himself; and her visit, as the moments passed, had more and more the effect of a signal communication that she had come, all responsibly and deliberately, as on the clear show of the clock-face of their situation, to make. The whole demonstration, none the less, presented itself as taking place at a very high level of debate--in the cool upper air of the finer (301) discrimination, the deeper sincerity, the larger philosophy. No matter what were the facts invoked and arrayed, it was only a question as yet of their seeing their way together: to which indeed exactly the present occasion appeared to have so much to contribute. "It's not that you have n't my courage," Charlotte said, "but that you have n't, I rather think, my imagination. Unless indeed it should turn out after all," she added, "that you have n't even my intelligence. However, I shan't be afraid of that till you've given me more proof." And she made again, but more clearly, her point of a moment before. "You knew besides, you knew to-day I'd come.
And if you knew that you know everything." So she pursued, and if he did n't meanwhile, if he did n't even at this, take her up, it might be that she was so positively fitting him again with the fair face of temporising kindness that he had given her, to keep her eyes on, at the other important juncture, and the sense of which she might ever since have been carrying about with her like a precious medal--not exactly blessed by the Pope--suspended round her neck. She had come back, however this might be, to her immediate account of herself, and no mention of their great previous passage was to rise to the lips of either. "Above all," she said, "there has been the personal romance of it."
"Of tea with me over the fire? Ah so far as that goes I don't think even my intelligence fails me."
"Oh it's further than that goes; and if I've had a better day than you it's perhaps, when I come to think of it, that I AM braver. You bore yourself, you see. But I don't. I don't, I don't" she repeated.
(302) "It's precisely boring one's self without relief," he protested, "that takes courage."
"Passive then--not active. My romance is that, if you want to know, I've been all day on the town. Literally on the town--is n't that what they call it? I know how it feels." After which, as if breaking off, "And you, have you never been out?" she asked.
He still stood there with his hands in his pockets. "What should I have gone out for?"
"Oh what should people in our case do anything for? But you're wonderful, all of YOU--you know how to live. We're clumsy brutes, we others, beside you--we must always be 'doing' something. However," Charlotte pursued, "if you had gone out you might have missed the chance of me--which I'm sure, though you won't confess it, was what you did n't want; and might have missed above all the satisfaction that, look blank about it as you will, I've come to congratulate you on. That's really what I can at last do. You can't NOT know at least, on such a day as this--you can't not know," she said, "where you are." She waited as for him either to grant he knew or pretend he did n't; but he only drew a long deep breath which came out like a moan of impatience. It brushed aside the question of where he was or what he knew; it seemed to keep the ground clear for the question of his visitor herself, that of Charlotte Verver exactly as she sat there.
So for some moments, with their long look, they but treated the matter in silence; with the effect indeed, by the end of the time, of having considerably brought it on. This was sufficiently marked in what Charlotte next said.
"There it all (303) is--extraordinary beyond words. It makes such a relation for us as, I verily believe, was never before in the world thrust upon two well-meaning creatures. Have n't we therefore to take things as we find them?" She put the question still more directly than that of a moment before, but to this one as well he returned no immediate answer. Noticing only that she had finished her tea he relieved her of her cup, carried it back to the table, asked her what more she would have; and then, on her "Nothing, thanks," returned to the fire and restored a displaced log to position by a small but almost too effectual kick. She had meanwhile got up again, and it was on her feet that she repeated the words she had first frankly spoken. "What else can we do, what in all the world else?"
He took them up however no more than at first. "Where then have you been?" he asked as from mere interest in her adventure.
"Everywhere I could think of--except to see people. I did n't want people--I wanted too much to think. But I've been back at intervals--three times; and then come away again. My cabman must think me crazy--it's very amusing;
I shall owe him, when we come to settle, more money than he has ever seen.
