it anything else. He allowed for himself, but she, exactly, allowed
still more; partly because, better placed for a sight of the matter, she
traced his unhappy perversion through reaches of its course into which he
could scarce follow it. He knew how he felt, but, besides knowing that,
she knew how he looked as well; he knew each of the things of importance
he was insidiously kept from doing, but she could add up the amount they
made, understand how much, with a lighter weight on his spirit, he might
have done, and thereby establish how, clever as he was, he fell short.
Above all she was in the secret of the difference between the forms he
went through--those of his little office under Government, those of
caring for his modest patrimony, for his library, for his garden in the
country, for the people in London whose invitations he accepted and
repaid--and the detachment that reigned beneath them and that made of all
behaviour, all that could in the least be called behaviour, a long act of
dissimulation. What it had come to was that he wore a mask painted with
the social simper, out of the eye-holes of which there looked eyes of an
expression not in the least matching the other features. This the stupid
world, even after years, had never more than half discovered. It was
only May Bartram who had, and she achieved, by an art indescribable, the
feat of at once--or perhaps it was only alternately--meeting the eyes
from in front and mingling her own vision, as from over his shoulder,
with their peep through the apertures.

So while they grew older together she did watch with him, and so she let
this association give shape and colour to her own existence. Beneath
_her_ forms as well detachment had learned to sit, and behaviour had
become for her, in the social sense, a false account of herself. There
was but one account of her that would have been true all the while and
that she could give straight to nobody, least of all to John Marcher. Her
whole attitude was a virtual statement, but the perception of that only