 parties to it so
carry herself. If it wasn't innocent why did she haunt the churches? - into
which, given the woman he could believe he made out, she would never have come
to flaunt an insolence of guilt. She haunted them for continued help, for
strength, for peace - sublime support which, if one were able to look at it so,
she found from day to day. They talked, in low easy tones and with lifted
lingering looks, about the great monument and its history and its beauty - all
of which, Madame de Vionnet professed, came to her most in the other, the outer
view. »We'll presently, after we go,« she said, »walk round it again if you
like. I'm not in a particular hurry, and it will be pleasant to look at it well
with you.« He had spoken of the great romancer and the great romance, and of
what, to his imagination, they had done for the whole, mentioning to her
moreover the exorbitance of his purchase, the seventy blazing volumes that were
so out of proportion.
    »Out of proportion to what?«
    »Well, to any other plunge.« Yet he felt even as he spoke how at that
instant he was plunging. He had made up his mind and was impatient to get into
the air; for his purpose was a purpose to be uttered outside, and he had a fear
that it might with delay still slip away from him. She however took her time;
she drew out their quiet gossip as if she had wished to profit by their meeting,
and this confirmed precisely an interpretation of her manner, of her mystery.
While she rose, as he would have called it, to the question of Victor Hugo, her
voice itself, the light low quaver of her deference to the solemnity about them,
seemed to make her words mean something that they didn't mean openly. Help,
strength, peace, a sublime support - she hadn't found so much of these things as
that the amount wouldn't be sensibly greater for any scrap his appearance of
faith in her might enable her to feel in her hand. Every little, in a long
strain, helped, and if he happened to affect her as a firm object she could hold
on by, he wouldn't jerk himself out of her reach. People in difficulties held on
by what was nearest, and he was perhaps after all not further off than sources
of comfort more abstract. It was as to this he had made
