Chapter 13 - Page 2

impatience broke into audible joy. She sprang up,
recognising me, always holding me, and gleefully cried to a
gentleman who was arrested in the doorway by the sight of me: "He
has come back, he has come back, and you should have heard what he
says of me!" The gentleman was Geoffrey Dawling, and I thought it
best to let him hear on the spot. "How beautiful she is, my dear
man--but how extraordinarily beautiful! More beautiful at this
hour than ever, ever before!"

It gave them almost equal pleasure and made Dawling blush to his
eyes; while this in turn produced, in spite of deepened
astonishment, a blest snap of the strain I had been struggling
with. I wanted to embrace them both, and while the opening bars of
another scene rose from the orchestra I almost did embrace Dawling,
whose first emotion on beholding me had visibly and ever so oddly
been a consciousness of guilt. I had caught him somehow in the
act, though that was as yet all I knew; but by the time we sank
noiselessly into our chairs again--for the music was supreme,
Wagner passed first--my demonstration ought pretty well to have
given him the limit of the criticism he had to fear. I myself
indeed, while the opera blazed, was only too afraid he might divine
in our silent closeness the very moral of my optimism, which was
simply the comfort I had gathered from seeing that if our
companion's beauty lived again her vanity partook of its life. I
had hit on the right note--that was what eased me off: it drew all
pain for the next half-hour from the sense of the deep darkness in
which the stricken woman sat. If the music, in that darkness,
happily soared and swelled for her, it beat its wings in unison
with those of a gratified passion. A great deal came and went
between us without profaning the occasion, so that I could feel at
the end of twenty minutes as if I knew almost everything he might
in kindness have to tell me; knew even why Flora, while I stared at
her from the stalls, had misled me by the use of ivory and crystal
and by appearing to recognise me and smile. She leaned back in her
chair in luxurious ease: I had from the first become aware that
the way she fingered her pearls was a sharp image of the wedded
state. Nothing of old had seemed wanting to her assurance, but I
hadn't then dreamed of the art with which she would wear that
assurance as a married woman. She had taken him when everything
had failed; he had taken her when she herself had done so. His
embarrassed eyes confessed it all, confessed the deep peace he
found in it. They only didn't tell me why he had not written to
me, nor clear up as yet a minor obscurity. Flora after a while
again lifted the glass from the ledge of the box and elegantly
swept the house with it.