precisely what was the matter with him. Something or other lay in wait
for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like
a crouching Beast in the Jungle. It signified little whether the
crouching Beast were destined to slay him or to be slain. The definite
point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the definite lesson
from that was that a man of feeling didn't cause himself to be
accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt. Such was the image under which he
had ended by figuring his life.

They had at first, none the less, in the scattered hours spent together,
made no allusion to that view of it; which was a sign he was handsomely
alert to give that he didn't expect, that he in fact didn't care, always
to be talking about it. Such a feature in one's outlook was really like
a hump on one's back. The difference it made every minute of the day
existed quite independently of discussion. One discussed of course
_like_ a hunchback, for there was always, if nothing else, the hunchback
face. That remained, and she was watching him; but people watched best,
as a general thing, in silence, so that such would be predominantly the
manner of their vigil. Yet he didn't want, at the same time, to be tense
and solemn; tense and solemn was what he imagined he too much showed for
with other people. The thing to be, with the one person who knew, was
easy and natural--to make the reference rather than be seeming to avoid
it, to avoid it rather than be seeming to make it, and to keep it, in any
case, familiar, facetious even, rather than pedantic and portentous. Some
such consideration as the latter was doubtless in his mind for instance
when he wrote pleasantly to Miss Bartram that perhaps the great thing he
had so long felt as in the lap of the gods was no more than this
circumstance, which touched him so nearly, of her acquiring a house in
London. It was the first allusion they had yet again made, needing any
other hitherto so little; but when she replied, after having given him