Chapter 5

THEY fell at last into the way of walking together almost every
time they met, though for a long time still they never met but at
church. He couldn't ask her to come and see him, and as if she
hadn't a proper place to receive him she never invited her friend.
As much as himself she knew the world of London, but from an
undiscussed instinct of privacy they haunted the region not mapped
on the social chart. On the return she always made him leave her
at the same corner. She looked with him, as a pretext for a pause,
at the depressed things in suburban shop-fronts; and there was
never a word he had said to her that she hadn't beautifully
understood. For long ages he never knew her name, any more than
she had ever pronounced his own; but it was not their names that
mattered, it was only their perfect practice and their common need.

These things made their whole relation so impersonal that they
hadn't the rules or reasons people found in ordinary friendships.
They didn't care for the things it was supposed necessary to care
for in the intercourse of the world. They ended one day - they
never knew which of them expressed it first - by throwing out the
idea that they didn't care for each other. Over this idea they
grew quite intimate; they rallied to it in a way that marked a
fresh start in their confidence. If to feel deeply together about
certain things wholly distinct from themselves didn't constitute a
safety, where was safety to be looked for? Not lightly nor often,
not without occasion nor without emotion, any more than in any
other reference by serious people to a mystery of their faith; but
when something had happened to warm, as it were, the air for it,
they came as near as they could come to calling their Dead by name.
They felt it was coming very near to utter their thought at all.
The word "they" expressed enough; it limited the mention, it had a
dignity of its own, and if, in their talk, you had heard our
friends use it, you might have taken them for a pair of pagans of
old alluding decently to the domesticated gods. They never knew -
at least Stransom never knew - how they had learned to be sure
about each other. If it had been with each a question of what the
other was there for, the certitude had come in some fine way of its
own. Any faith, after all, has the instinct of propagation, and it
was as natural as it was beautiful that they should have taken
pleasure on the spot in the imagination of a following. If the
following was for each but a following of one it had proved in the
event sufficient. Her debt, however, of course was much greater
than his, because while she had only given him a worshipper he had
given her a splendid temple. Once she said she pitied him for the
length of