take everything else for granted, and the noisy American world had
deafened my care to possible contradictions. Her spectacles were at
present a direct contradiction; they seemed a negation not only of new
relationships but of every old one as well. I remember nevertheless that
when after a moment she walked beside me on the grass I found myself
nervously hoping she wouldn't as yet at any rate tell me anything very
dreadful; so that to stave off this danger I harried her with questions
about Mrs. Meldrum and, without waiting for replies, became profuse on
the subject of my own doings. My companion was finely silent, and I felt
both as if she were watching my nervousness with a sort of sinister irony
and as if I were talking to some different and strange person. Flora
plain and obscure and dumb was no Flora at all. At Mrs. Meldrum's door
she turned off with the observation that as there was certainly a great
deal I should have to say to our friend she had better not go in with me.
I looked at her again--I had been keeping my eyes away from her--but only
to meet her magnified stare. I greatly desired in truth to see Mrs.
Meldrum alone, but there was something so grim in the girl's trouble that
I hesitated to fall in with this idea of dropping her. Yet one couldn't
express a compassion without seeming to take for granted more trouble
than there actually might have been. I reflected that I must really
figure to her as a fool, which was an entertainment I had never expected
to give her. It rolled over me there for the first time--it has come
back to me since--that there is, wondrously, in very deep and even in
very foolish misfortune a dignity still finer than in the most inveterate
habit of being all right. I couldn't have to her the manner of treating
it as a mere detail that I was face to face with a part of what, at our
last meeting, we had had such a scene about; but while I was trying to
think of some manner that I _could_ have she said quite colourlessly,
though somehow as if she might never see me again: "Good-bye. I'm going
to take my walk."