He had to listen
to her in a silence that he made no immediate effort to attenuate,
feeling her doubly woeful amid all her dim diffused elegance;
consenting to it as he had consented to the rest, and even
conscious of some vague inward irony in the presence of such a fine
free range of bliss and bale. He couldn't say it was NOT no
matter; for he was serving her to the end, he now knew, anyway--
quite as if what he thought of her had nothing to do with it.
It was actually moreover as if he didn't think of her at all,
as if he could think of nothing but the passion, mature, abysmal,
pitiful, she represented, and the possibilities she betrayed.
She was older for him to-night, visibly less exempt from the
touch of time; but she was as much as ever the finest and
subtlest creature, the happiest apparition, it had been given him,
in all his years, to meet; and yet he could see her there as
vulgarly troubled, in very truth, as a maidservant crying for
her young man. The only thing was that she judged herself as
the maidservant wouldn't; the weakness of which wisdom too,
the dishonour of which judgement, seemed but to sink her lower.
Her collapse, however, no doubt, was briefer and she had in a
manner recovered herself before he intervened.
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