introducing me. I remember our going together one Sunday in August
to a huddled house in Chelsea, and my renewed envy of Corvick's
possession of a friend who had some light to mingle with his own.
He could say things to her that I could never say to him. She had
indeed no sense of humour and, with her pretty way of holding her
head on one side, was one of those persons whom you want, as the
phrase is, to shake, but who have learnt Hungarian by themselves.
She conversed perhaps in Hungarian with Corvick; she had remarkably
little English for his friend. Corvick afterwards told me that I
had chilled her by my apparent indisposition to oblige them with
the detail of what Vereker had said to me. I allowed that I felt I
had given thought enough to that indication: hadn't I even made up
my mind that it was vain and would lead nowhere? The importance
they attached to it was irritating and quite envenomed my doubts.

That statement looks unamiable, and what probably happened was that
I felt humiliated at seeing other persons deeply beguiled by an
experiment that had brought me only chagrin. I was out in the cold
while, by the evening fire, under the lamp, they followed the chase
for which I myself had sounded the horn. They did as I had done,
only more deliberately and sociably--they went over their author
from the beginning. There was no hurry, Corvick said the future
was before them and the fascination could only grow; they would
take him page by page, as they would take one of the classics,
inhale him in slow draughts and let him sink all the way in. They
would scarce have got so wound up, I think, if they hadn't been in
love: poor Vereker's inner meaning gave them endless occasion to
put and to keep their young heads together. None the less it
represented the kind of problem for which Corvick had a special
aptitude, drew out the particular pointed patience of which, had he