was this time the fatal kind; it would prevent.

Well, she saw him the very next day, and on this second occasion it was
quite different; the sense of every syllable he paid for was fiercely
distinct; she indeed felt her progressive pencil, dabbing as if with a
quick caress the marks of his own, put life into every stroke. He was
there a long time--had not brought his forms filled out but worked them
off in a nook on the counter; and there were other people as well--a
changing pushing cluster, with every one to mind at once and endless
right change to make and information to produce. But she kept hold of
him throughout; she continued, for herself, in a relation with him as
close as that in which, behind the hated ground glass, Mr. Buckton
luckily continued with the sounder. This morning everything changed, but
rather to dreariness; she had to swallow the rebuff to her theory about
fatal desires, which she did without confusion and indeed with absolute
levity; yet if it was now flagrant that he did live close at hand--at
Park Chambers--and belonged supremely to the class that wired everything,
even their expensive feelings (so that, as he never wrote, his
correspondence cost him weekly pounds and pounds, and he might be in and
out five times a day) there was, all the same, involved in the prospect,
and by reason of its positive excess of light, a perverse melancholy, a
gratuitous misery. This was at once to give it a place in an order of
feelings on which I shall presently touch.

Meanwhile, for a month, he was very constant. Cissy, Mary, never
re-appeared with him; he was always either alone or accompanied only by
some gentleman who was lost in the blaze of his glory. There was another
sense, however--and indeed there was more than one--in which she mostly
found herself counting in the splendid creature with whom she had
originally connected him. He addressed this correspondent neither as