I could only get on at all by taking
“nature” into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous
ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but
demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw
of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require
more tact than just this attempt to supply, one’s self, _all_ the
nature. How could I put even a little of that article into a
suppression of reference to what had occurred? How, on the other hand,
could I make reference without a new plunge into the hideous obscure? Well, a sort of answer, after a time, had come to me, and it was so far
confirmed as that I was met, incontestably, by the quickened vision of
what was rare in my little companion. It was indeed as if he had found
even now—as he had so often found at lessons—still some other delicate
way to ease me off. Wasn’t there light in the fact which, as we shared
our solitude, broke out with a specious glitter it had never yet quite
worn?—the fact that (opportunity aiding, precious opportunity which had
now come) it would be preposterous, with a child so endowed, to forego
the help one might wrest from absolute intelligence? What had his
intelligence been given him for but to save him? Mightn’t one, to reach
his mind, risk the stretch of an angular arm over his character? It was
as if, when we were face to face in the dining room, he had literally
shown me the way. The roast mutton was on the table, and I had
dispensed with attendance. Miles, before he sat down, stood a moment
with his hands in his pockets and looked at the joint, on which he
seemed on the point of passing some humorous judgment. But what he
presently produced was: “I say, my dear, is she really very awfully
ill?”

“Little Flora? Not so bad but that she’ll presently be better. London
will set her up. Bly had ceased to agree with her. Come here and take
your mutton.”

He alertly obeyed me, carried the plate carefully to his seat, and,
when he was established, went on. “Did Bly disagree with her so
terribly suddenly?”

“Not so suddenly as you might think. One had seen it coming on.”

“Then why didn’t you get her off before?”

“Before what?”

“Before she became too ill to travel.”

I found myself prompt. “She’s _not_ too ill to travel: she only might
have become so if she had stayed. This was just the moment to seize. The journey will dissipate the influence”—oh, I was grand!—“and carry
it off.”

“I see, I see”—Miles, for that matter, was grand, too. He settled to
his repast with the charming little “table manner” that, from the day
of his arrival, had relieved me of all grossness of admonition. Whatever he had been driven from school for, it was not for ugly
feeding. He was irreproachable, as always, today; but he was
unmistakably more conscious. He was discernibly trying to take for
granted more things than he found, without assistance, quite easy; and
he dropped into peaceful silence while he felt his situation. Our meal
was of the briefest—mine a vain pretense, and I had the things
immediately removed. While this was done Miles stood again with his
hands in his little pockets and his back to me—stood and looked out of
the wide window through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled
me up. We continued silent while the maid was with us—as silent, it
whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding
journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter. He turned
round only when the waiter had left us. “Well—so we’re alone!”


XXIII

“Oh, more or less.” I fancy my smile was pale. “Not absolutely. We
shouldn’t like that!” I went on. “No—I suppose we shouldn’t. Of course we have the others.”

“We have the others—we have indeed the others,” I concurred. “Yet even though we have them,” he returned, still with his hands in
his pockets and planted there in front of me, “they don’t much count,
do they?”

I made the best of it, but I felt wan. “It depends on what you call
‘much’!”

“Yes”—with all accommodation—“everything depends!” On this, however, he
faced to the window again and presently reached it with his vague,
restless, cogitating step. He remained there awhile, with his forehead
against the glass, in contemplation of the stupid shrubs I knew and the
dull things of November. I had always my hypocrisy of “work,” behind
which, now, I gained the sofa. Steadying myself with it there as I had
repeatedly done at those moments of torment that I have described as
the moments of my knowing the children to be given to something from
which I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of being prepared
for the worst. But an extraordinary impression dropped on me as I
extracted a meaning from the boy’s embarrassed back—none other than the
impression that I was not barred now. This inference grew in a few
minutes to sharp intensity and seemed bound up with the direct
perception that it was positively _he_ who was. The frames and squares
of the great window were a kind of image, for him, of a kind of
failure. I felt that I saw him, at any rate, shut in or shut out. He
was admirable, but not comfortable: I took it in with a throb of hope. Wasn’t he looking, through the haunted pane, for something he couldn’t
see?—and wasn’t it the first time in the whole business that he had
known such a lapse? The first, the very first: I found it a splendid
portent. It made him anxious, though he watched himself; he had been
anxious all day and, even while in his usual sweet little manner he sat
at table, had needed all his small strange genius to give it a gloss. When he at last turned round to meet me, it was almost as if this
genius had succumbed. “Well, I think I’m glad Bly agrees with _me!_”

“You would certainly seem to have seen, these twenty-four hours, a good
deal more of it than for some time before. I hope,” I went on bravely,
“that you’ve been enjoying yourself.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve been ever so far; all round about—miles and miles away. I’ve never been so free.”

He had really a manner of his own, and I could only try to keep up with
him. “Well, do you like it?”

He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words—“Do
_you?_”—more discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain. Before I had time to deal with that, however, he continued as if with
the sense that this was an impertinence to be softened. “Nothing could
be more charming than the way you take it, for of course if we’re alone
together now it’s you that are alone most. But I hope,” he threw in,
“you don’t particularly mind!”

“Having to do with you?” I asked. “My dear child, how can I help
minding? Though I’ve renounced all claim to your company—you’re so
beyond me—I at least greatly enjoy it. What else should I stay on for?”

He looked at me more directly, and the expression of his face, graver
now, struck me as the most beautiful I had ever found in it. “You stay
on just for _that?_”

“Certainly.