第7章

His work in fact was blurred a little all that day by the sense of what had now passed between them.It wasn't much, but it had just made the difference.They had listened together to Beethoven and Schumann; they had talked in the pauses, and at the end, when at the door, to which they moved together, he had asked her if he could help her in the matter of getting away.She had thanked him and put up her umbrella, slipping into the crowd without an allusion to their meeting yet again and leaving him to remember at leisure that not a word had been exchanged about the usual scene of that coincidence.This omission struck him now as natural and then again as perverse.She mightn't in the least have allowed his warrant for speaking to her, and yet if she hadn't he would have judged her an underbred woman.It was odd that when nothing had really ever brought them together he should have been able successfully to assume they were in a manner old friends - that this negative quantity was somehow more than they could express.

His success, it was true, had been qualified by her quick escape, so that there grew up in him an absurd desire to put it to some better test.Save in so far as some other poor chance might help him, such a test could be only to meet her afresh at church.Left to himself he would have gone to church the very next afternoon, just for the curiosity of seeing if he should find her there.But he wasn't left to himself, a fact he discovered quite at the last, after he had virtually made up his mind to go.The influence that kept him away really revealed to him how little to himself his Dead EVER left him.He went only for THEM - for nothing else in the world.

The force of this revulsion kept him away ten days: he hated to connect the place with anything but his offices or to give a glimpse of the curiosity that had been on the point of moving him.

It was absurd to weave a tangle about a matter so simple as a custom of devotion that might with ease have been daily or hourly;yet the tangle got itself woven.He was sorry, he was disappointed: it was as if a long happy spell had been broken and he had lost a familiar security.At the last, however, he asked himself if he was to stay away for ever from the fear of this muddle about motives.After an interval neither longer nor shorter than usual he re-entered the church with a clear conviction that he should scarcely heed the presence or the absence of the lady of the concert.This indifference didn't prevent his at once noting that for the only time since he had first seen her she wasn't on the spot.He had now no scruple about giving her time to arrive, but she didn't arrive, and when he went away still missing her he was profanely and consentingly sorry.If her absence made the tangle more intricate, that was all her own doing.By the end of another year it was very intricate indeed; but by that time he didn't in the least care, and it was only his cultivated consciousness that had given him scruples.Three times in three months he had gone to church without finding her, and he felt he hadn't needed these occasions to show him his suspense had dropped.Yet it was, incongruously, not indifference, but a refinement of delicacy that had kept him from asking the sacristan, who would of course immediately have recognised his description of her, whether she had been seen at other hours.His delicacy had kept him from asking any question about her at any time, and it was exactly the same virtue that had left him so free to be decently civil to her at the concert.

This happy advantage now served him anew, enabling him when she finally met his eyes - it was after a fourth trial - to predetermine quite fixedly his awaiting her retreat.He joined her in the street as soon as she had moved, asking her if he might accompany her a certain distance.With her placid permission he went as far as a house in the neighbourhood at which she had business: she let him know it was not where she lived.She lived, as she said, in a mere slum, with an old aunt, a person in connexion with whom she spoke of the engrossment of humdrum duties and regular occupations.She wasn't, the mourning niece, in her first youth, and her vanished freshness had left something behind that, for Stransom, represented the proof it had been tragically sacrificed.Whatever she gave him the assurance of she gave without references.She might have been a divorced duchess - she might have been an old maid who taught the harp.