of interest. How in fact could you feel interest unless you should
know, within you, some dim stir of imagination? There was nothing in
the world of which Murray Brush was less capable than of such a dim
stir, because you only began to imagine when you felt some approach to
a need to understand. _He_ had never felt it; for hadn't he been born,
to his personal vision, with that perfect intuition of everything
which reduces all the suggested preliminaries of judgment to the
impertinence--when it's a question of your entering your house--of
a dumpage of bricks at your door? He had had, in short, neither to
imagine nor to perceive, because he had, from the first pulse of his
intelligence, simply and supremely known: so that, at this hour,
face to face with him, it came over her that she had, in their old
relation, dispensed with any such convenience of comprehension on his
part even to a degree she had not measured at the time. What therefore
must he not have seemed to her as a form of life, a form of avidity
and activity, blatantly successful in its own conceit, that he could
have dazzled her so against the interest of her very faculties and
functions? Strangely and richly historic all that backward mystery,
and only leaving for her mind the wonder of such a mixture of
possession and detachment as they would clearly to-day both know.
For each to be so little at last to the other when, during months
together, the idea of all abundance, all quantity, had been, for
each, drawn from the other and addressed to the other--what was it
monstrously like but some fantastic act of getting rid of a person by
going to lock yourself up in the _sanctum sanctorum_ of that person's
house, amid every evidence of that person's habits and nature? What
was going to happen, at any rate, was that Murray would show himself
as beautifully and consciously understanding--and it would be
prodigious that Europe should have inoculated him with that delicacy.
Yes, he wouldn't claim to know now till she had told him--an aid to