was enough to make me wonder if I should have to marry Mrs. Corvick
to get what I wanted. Was I prepared to offer her this price for
the blessing of her knowledge? Ah that way madness lay!--so I at
least said to myself in bewildered hours. I could see meanwhile
the torch she refused to pass on flame away in her chamber of
memory--pour through her eyes a light that shone in her lonely
house. At the end of six months I was fully sure of what this warm
presence made up to her for. We had talked again and again of the
man who had brought us together--of his talent, his character, his
personal charm, his certain career, his dreadful doom, and even of
his clear purpose in that great study which was to have been a
supreme literary portrait, a kind of critical Vandyke or Velasquez.
She had conveyed to me in abundance that she was tongue-tied by her
perversity, by her piety, that she would never break the silence it
had not been given to the "right person," as she said, to break.
The hour however finally arrived. One evening when I had been
sitting with her longer than usual I laid my hand firmly on her
arm. "Now at last what IS it?"

She had been expecting me and was ready. She gave a long slow
soundless headshake, merciful only in being inarticulate. This
mercy didn't prevent its hurling at me the largest finest coldest
"Never!" I had yet, in the course of a life that had known denials,
had to take full in the face. I took it and was aware that with
the hard blow the tears had come into my eyes. So for a while we
sat and looked at each other; after which I slowly rose, I was
wondering if some day she would accept me; but this was not what I
brought out. I said as I smoothed down my hat: "I know what to
think then. It's nothing!"