"You wouldn't, in spite of your belief,"--I smiled at her--"like to be a little further off yet?" But before she could answer, and because also, doubtless, the question had too much the sound of a taunt, I came up, as if for her real convenience, quite in another place. "Perhaps my idea--my timing, that is, of your crisis--is the result, in my mind, of my own association with that particular instant. It comes back to me that what I was most full of while your face signed to me and your voice then so graciously confirmed it, and while too, as I've said, Long walked away--what I was most full of, as a consequence of another go, just ended, at Lady John, was, once more, this same Lady John's want of adjustability to the character you and I, in our associated speculation of the morning, had so candidly tried to fit her with. I was still even then, you see, speculating--all on my own hook, alas!--and it had just rolled over me with renewed force that she was nothing whatever, not the least little bit, to our purpose. The moment, in other words, if you understand, happened to be one of _my_ moments; so that, by the same token, I simply wondered if it mightn't likewise have happened to be one of yours." "It _was_ one of mine," Mrs. Briss replied as promptly as I could reasonably have expected; "in the sense that--as you've only to consider--it was to lead more or less directly to these present words of ours." If I had only to consider, nothing was more easy; but each time I considered, I was ready to show, the less there seemed left by the act. "Ah, but you had then _already_ backed out. _Won't_ you understand--for you're a little discouraging--that I want to catch you at the earlier stage?" "To 'catch' me?" I had indeed expressions! "Absolutely catch! Focus you under the first shock of the observation that was to make everything fall to pieces for you." "But I've told you," she stoutly resisted, "that there was no 'first' shock." "Well, then, the second or the third." "There was no shock," Mrs. Briss magnificently said, "at all." It made me somehow break into laughter. "You found it so natural then--and you so rather liked it--to make up your mind of a sudden that you had been steeped in the last intellectual intimacy with a maniac?" She thought once more, and then, as I myself had just previously done, came up in another place. "I had at the moment you speak of wholly given up any idea of Lady John." But it was so feeble it made me smile. "Of course you had, you poor innocent! You couldn't otherwise, hours before, have strapped the saddle so tight on another woman." "I had given up everything," she stubbornly continued. "It's exactly what, in reference to that juncture, I perfectly embrace."