I was struck in the presence of these tidings with the fundamental detachment that Mrs. Corvick’s public regret quite failed to conceal: it gave me the measure of her consummate independence. That independence rested on her knowledge, the knowledge which nothing now could destroy and which nothing could make different. The figure in the carpet might take on another twist or two, but the sentence had virtually been written. The writer might go down to his grave: she was the person in the world to whom--as if she had been his favoured heir--his continued existence was least of a need. This reminded me how I had observed at a particular moment--after Corvick’s death--the drop of her desire to see him face to face. She had got what she wanted without that. I had been sure that if she hadn’t got it she wouldn’t have been restrained from the endeavour to sound him personally by those superior reflections, more conceivable on a man’s part than on a woman’s, which in my case had served as a deterrent. It wasn’t however, I hasten to add, that my case, in spite of this invidious comparison, wasn’t ambiguous enough. At the thought that Vereker was perhaps at that moment dying there rolled over me a wave of anguish--a poignant sense of how inconsistently I still depended on him. A delicacy that it was my one compensation to suffer to rule me had left the Alps and the Apennines between us, but the vision of the waning opportunity made me feel as if I might in my despair at last have gone to him. Of course I would really have done nothing of the sort. I remained five minutes, while my companions talked of the new book, and when Drayton Deane appealed to me for my opinion of it I replied, getting up, that I detested Hugh Vereker--simply couldn’t read him. I went away with the moral certainty that as the door closed behind me Deane would remark that I was awfully superficial. His hostess wouldn’t contradict him.