house, just waiting as to see if a memory or two more wouldn't again
breathe on them. It hadn't taken them many minutes, after all, to put
down on the table, like the cards of a pack, those that constituted their
respective hands; only what came out was that the pack was unfortunately
not perfect--that the past, invoked, invited, encouraged, could give
them, naturally, no more than it had. It had made them anciently
meet--her at twenty, him at twenty-five; but nothing was so strange, they
seemed to say to each other, as that, while so occupied, it hadn't done a
little more for them. They looked at each other as with the feeling of
an occasion missed; the present would have been so much better if the
other, in the far distance, in the foreign land, hadn't been so stupidly
meagre. There weren't, apparently, all counted, more than a dozen little
old things that had succeeded in coming to pass between them;
trivialities of youth, simplicities of freshness, stupidities of
ignorance, small possible germs, but too deeply buried--too deeply
(didn't it seem?) to sprout after so many years. Marcher could only feel
he ought to have rendered her some service--saved her from a capsized
boat in the bay or at least recovered her dressing-bag, filched from her
cab in the streets of Naples by a lazzarone with a stiletto. Or it would
have been nice if he could have been taken with fever all alone at his
hotel, and she could have come to look after him, to write to his people,
to drive him out in convalescence. _Then_ they would be in possession of
the something or other that their actual show seemed to lack. It yet
somehow presented itself, this show, as too good to be spoiled; so that
they were reduced for a few minutes more to wondering a little helplessly
why--since they seemed to know a certain number of the same people--their
reunion had been so long averted. They didn't use that name for it, but
their delay from minute to minute to join the others was a kind of
confession that they didn't quite want it to be a failure. Their
attempted supposition of reasons for their not having met but showed how