Part 25 (1/2)

If Long _is_ just what he always was it settles the matter, and the special clincher for us can be but your honest final impression, made precisely more aware of itself by repentance for the levity with which you had originally yielded to my contagion.”

She didn't insist on her repentance; she was too taken up with the facts themselves. ”Oh, but add to my impression everyone else's impression!

Has anyone noticed anything?”

”Ah, I don't know what anyone has noticed. I haven't,” I brooded, ”ventured--as you know--to ask anyone.”

”Well, if you had you'd have seen--seen, I mean, all they don't see. If they had been conscious they'd have talked.”

I thought. ”To me?”

”Well, I'm not sure to you; people have such a notion of what you embroider on things that they're rather afraid to commit themselves or to lead you on: they're sometimes in, you know,” she luminously reminded me, ”for more than they bargain for, than they quite know what to do with, or than they care to have on their hands.”

I tried to do justice to this account of myself. ”You mean I see so much?”

It was a delicate matter, but she risked it. ”Don't you sometimes see horrors?”

I wondered. ”Well, names are a convenience. People catch me in the act?”

”They certainly think you critical.”

”And is criticism the vision of horrors?”

She couldn't quite be sure where I was taking her. ”It isn't, perhaps, so much that you see them----”

I started. ”As that I perpetrate them?”

She was sure now, however, and wouldn't have it, for she was serious.

”Dear no--you don't perpetrate anything. Perhaps it would be better if you did!” she tossed off with an odd laugh. ”But--always by people's idea--you like them.”

I followed. ”Horrors?”

”Well, you don't----”

”Yes----?”

But she wouldn't be hurried now. ”You take them too much for what they are. You don't seem to want----”

”To come down on them strong? Oh, but I often do!”

”So much the better then.”

”Though I do like--whether for that or not,” I hastened to confess, ”to look them first well in the face.”

Our eyes met, with this, for a minute, but she made nothing of that.

”When they _have_ no face, then, you can't do it! It isn't at all events now a question,” she went on, ”of people's keeping anything back, and you're perhaps in any case not the person to whom it would first have come.”

I tried to think then who the person would be. ”It would have come to Long himself?”

But she was impatient of this. ”Oh, one doesn't know what comes--or what doesn't--to Long himself! I'm not sure he's too modest to misrepresent--if he had the intelligence to play a part.”