, so pat, as might have been said, that he
felt on the instant its origin. »She has confided to my judgement and my
tenderness the expression of her personal sense of everything, and the assertion
of her personal dignity.«
    They were the very words of the lady of Woollett - he would have known them
in a thousand; her parting charge to her child. Mrs. Pocock accordingly spoke to
this extent by book, and the fact immensely moved him. »If she does really feel
as you say it's of course very very dreadful. I've given sufficient proof, one
would have thought,« he added, »of my deep admiration for Mrs. Newsome.«
    »And pray what proof would one have thought you'd call sufficient? That of
thinking this person here so far superior to her?«
    He wondered again; he waited. »Ah dear Sarah, you must leave me this person
here!«
    In his desire to avoid all vulgar retorts, to show how, even perversely, he
clung to his rag of reason, he had softly almost wailed this plea. Yet he knew
it to be perhaps the most positive declaration he had ever made in his life, and
his visitor's reception of it virtually gave it that importance. »That's exactly
what I'm delighted to do. God knows we don't want her! You take good care not to
meet,« she observed in a still higher key, »my question about their life. If you
do consider it a thing one can even speak of, I congratulate you on your taste!«
    The life she alluded to was of course Chad's and Madame de Vionnet's, which
she thus bracketed together in a way that made him wince a little; there being
nothing for him but to take home her full intention. It was none the less his
inconsequence that while he had himself been enjoying for weeks the view of the
brilliant woman's specific action, he just suffered from any characterisation of
it by other lips. »I think tremendously well of her, at the same time that I
seem to feel her life to be really none of my business. It's my business, that
is, only so far as Chad's own life is affected by it; and what has happened,
don't you see? is that Chad's has been affected so beautifully. The proof of the
pudding's in the eating« - he tried, with no great success, to help it out with