suspecting that he was a "resource" for Madame de Mauves. He had made
her acquaintance with the sense, not wholly inspiring, that she was a
woman with a painful twist in her life and that seeking her acquaintance
would be like visiting at a house where there was an invalid who could
bear no noise. But he very soon recognised that her grievance, if
grievance it was, was not aggressive; that it was not fond of attitudes
and ceremonies, and that her most earnest wish was to remember it as
little as possible. He felt that even if Mrs. Draper hadn't told him she
was unhappy he would have guessed it, and yet that he couldn't have
pointed to his proof. The evidence was chiefly negative--she never
alluded to her husband. Beyond this it seemed to him simply that her
whole being was pitched in a lower key than harmonious Nature had
designed; she was like a powerful singer who had lost her high notes.
She never drooped nor sighed nor looked unutterable things; she dealt no
sarcastic digs at her fate; she had in short none of the conscious
graces of the woman wronged. Only Longmore was sure that her gentle
gaiety was but the milder or sharper flush of a settled ache, and that
she but tried to interest herself in his thoughts in order to escape
from her own. If she had wished to irritate his curiosity and lead him
to take her confidence by storm nothing could have served her purpose
better than this studied discretion. He measured the rare magnanimity of
self-effacement so deliberate, he felt how few women were capable of
exchanging a luxurious woe for a thankless effort. Madame de Mauves, he
himself felt, wasn't sweeping the horizon for a compensation or a
consoler; she had suffered a personal deception that had disgusted her
with persons. She wasn't planning to get the worth of her trouble back
in some other way; for the present she was proposing to live with it
peaceably, reputably and without scandal--turning the key on it
occasionally as you would on a companion liable to attacks of insanity.
Longmore was a man of fine senses and of a speculative spirit, leading-