perplexity herself. He looked at her again, met her own eyes and saw
them fill with strange tears. Then this last sophistry of his great
desire for her knew itself touched as a bubble is pricked; it died away
with a stifled murmur, and her beauty, more and more radiant in the
darkness, rose before him as a symbol of something vague which was yet
more beautiful than itself. "I may understand you to-morrow," he said,
"but I don't understand you now."

"And yet I took counsel with myself to-day and asked myself how I had
best speak to you. On one side I might have refused to see you at all."
Longmore made a violent movement, and she added: "In that case I should
have written to you. I might see you, I thought, and simply say to you
that there were excellent reasons why we should part, and that I begged
this visit should be your last. This I inclined to do; what made me
decide otherwise was--well, simply that I like you so. I said to myself
that I should be glad to remember in future days, not that I had, in the
horrible phrase, got rid of you, but that you had gone away out of the
fulness of your own wisdom and the excellence of your own taste."

"Ah wisdom and taste!" the poor young man wailed.

"I'm prepared, if necessary," Madame de Mauves continued after a pause,
"to fall back on my strict right. But, as I said before, I shall be
greatly disappointed if I'm obliged to do that."

"When I listen to your horrible and unnatural lucidity," Longmore
answered, "I feel so angry, so merely sore and sick, that I wonder I
don't leave you without more words."

"If you should go away in anger this idea of mine about our parting