He looked rather cheerfully at sea. “Is that then why you tell me?” “I mean for her to know you know it. Therefore it`s in your interest not to let her.”
“I see,” Voyt after a moment returned. “Your real calculation is that my interest will be sacrificed to my vanity so that, if your other idea is just, the flame will in fact, and thanks to her morbid conscience, expire by her taking fright at seeing me so pleased. But I promise you,” he declared, “that she sha`n`t see it. So there you are!” She kept her eyes on him and had evidently to admit, after a little, that there she was. Distinct as he had made the case, however, he was not yet quite satisfied. “Why are you so sure that I`m the man?”
“From the way she denies you.”
“You put it to her?”
“Straight. If you hadn`t been she would, of course, have confessed to you to keep me in the dark about the real one.”
Poor Voyt laughed out again. “Oh, you dear souls!”
“Besides,” his companion pursued, “I was not in want of that evidence.”
“Then what other had you?”
“Her state before you came which was what made me ask you how much you had seen her. And her state after it,” Mrs. Dyott added. “And her state,” she wound up, “while you were here.”
“But her state while I was here was charming.”
“Charming. That`s just what I say.”
Consciousness
She said it in a tone that placed the matter in its right light a light in which they appeared kindly, quite tenderly, to watch Maud wander way into space with her lovely head bent under a theory rather too big in it. Voyt`s last word, however, was that there was just enough in it in the theory for them to allow that she had not shown herself, on l he occasion of their talk, wholly bereft of sense.
Her consciousness, if Liry let it alone as they of course after this, mercifully must was, in (he last analysis, a kind of shy romance. Not a romance like their “a thing to make the fortune of any author up to the mark one who should have the invention or who could have the courage; but a Ninall, scared, starved, subjective satisfaction that would do her no harm .Hid nobody else any good. Who but a duffer he stuck to his contention would see the shadow of a “story” in it?
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