"You after all then now don't?" It was she herself whom the words at present described! "Then what on earth _do_ you think?" The strange mixture in my face naturally made her ask it, but everything, within a minute, had somehow so given way under the touch of her supreme assurance, the presentation of her own now finished system, that I dare say I couldn't at the moment have in the least trusted myself to tell her. She left me, however, in fact, small time--she only took enough, with her negations arrayed and her insolence recaptured, to judge me afresh, which she did as she gathered herself up into the strength of twenty-five. I didn't after all--it appeared part of my smash--know the weight of her husband's years, but I knew the weight of my own. They might have been a thousand, and nothing but the sense of them would in a moment, I saw, be left me. "My poor dear, you _are_ crazy, and I bid you good-night!" Nothing but the sense of them--on my taking it from her without a sound and watching her, through the lighted rooms, retreat and disappear--_was_ at first left me; but after a minute something else came, and I grew conscious that her verdict lingered. She had so had the last word that, to get out of its planted presence, I shook myself, as I had done before, from my thought. When once I had started to my room indeed--and to preparation for a livelier start as soon as the house should stir again--I almost breathlessly hurried. Such a last word--the word that put me altogether nowhere--was too unacceptable not to prescribe afresh that prompt test of escape to other air for which I had earlier in the evening seen so much reason. I _should_ certainly never again, on the spot, quite hang together, even though it wasn't really that I hadn't three times her method. What I too fatally lacked was her tone. THE END Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: insistance=>insistence openely=>openly