Chapter 6

SHE was always in mourning, yet the day he came back from the
longest absence he had yet made her appearance immediately told him
she had lately had a bereavement. They met on this occasion as she
was leaving the church, so that postponing his own entrance he
instantly offered to turn round and walk away with her. She
considered, then she said: "Go in now, but come and see me in an
hour." He knew the small vista of her street, closed at the end
and as dreary as an empty pocket, where the pairs of shabby little
houses, semi-detached but indissolubly united, were like married
couples on bad terms. Often, however, as he had gone to the
beginning he had never gone beyond. Her aunt was dead - that he
immediately guessed, as well as that it made a difference; but when
she had for the first time mentioned her number he found himself,
on her leaving him, not a little agitated by this sudden
liberality. She wasn't a person with whom, after all, one got on
so very fast: it had taken him months and months to learn her
name, years and years to learn her address. If she had looked, on
this reunion, so much older to him, how in the world did he look to
her? She had reached the period of life he had long since reached,
when, after separations, the marked clock-face of the friend we
meet announces the hour we have tried to forget. He couldn't have
said what he expected as, at the end of his waiting, he turned the
corner where for years he had always paused; simply not to pause
was a efficient cause for emotion. It was an event, somehow; and
in all their long acquaintance there had never been an event. This
one grew larger when, five minutes later, in the faint elegance of
her little drawing-room, she quavered out a greeting that showed
the measure she took of it. He had a strange sense of having come
for something in particular; strange because literally there was
nothing particular between them, nothing save that they were at one
on their great point, which had long ago become a magnificent
matter of course. It was true that after she had said "You can
always come now, you know," the thing he was there for seemed
already to have happened. He asked her if it was the death of her
aunt that made the difference; to which she replied: "She never
knew I knew you. I wished her not to." The beautiful clearness of
her candour - her faded beauty was like a summer twilight -
disconnected the words from any image of deceit. They might have
struck him as the record of a deep dissimulation; but she had
always given him a sense of noble reasons. The vanished aunt was
present, as he looked about him, in the small complacencies of the
room, the beaded velvet and the fluted moreen; and though, as we
know, he had the worship of the