"She _thinks_ you know," he after a moment answered. I could only stare. "Mrs. Server thinks I know what makes her happy?" I the more easily represented such a conviction as monstrous in that it truly had its surprise for me. But Brissenden now was all with his own thought. "She _isn't_ happy." "You mean that that's what's the matter with her under her appearance----? Then what makes the appearance so extraordinary?" "Why, exactly what I mention--that one doesn't see anything whatever in her to correspond to it." I hesitated. "Do you mean in her circumstances?" "Yes--or in her character. Her circumstances are nothing wonderful. She has none too much money; she has had three children and lost them; and nobody that belongs to her appears ever to have been particularly nice to her." I turned it over. "How you _do_ get on with her!" "Do you call it getting on with her to be the more bewildered the more I see her?" "Isn't to say you're bewildered only, on the whole, to say you're charmed? That always--doesn't it?--describes more or less any engrossed relation with a lovely lady." "Well, I'm not sure I'm so charmed." He spoke as if he had thought this particular question over for himself; he had his way of being lucid without brightness. "I'm not at all easily charmed, you know," he the next moment added; "and I'm not a fellow who goes about much after women." "Ah, that I never supposed! Why in the world _should_ you? It's the last thing!" I laughed. "But isn't this--quite (what shall one call it?) innocently--rather a peculiar case?" My question produced in him a little gesture of elation--a gesture emphasised by a snap of his forefinger and thumb. "I knew you knew it was special! I knew you've been thinking about it!" "You certainly," I replied with assurance, "have, during the last five minutes, made me do so with some sharpness. I don't pretend that I don't now recognise that there _must_ be something the matter. I only desire--not unnaturally--that there _should_ be, to put me in the right for having thought, if, as you're so sure, such a freedom as that can be brought home to me. If Mrs. Server is beautiful and gentle and strange," I speciously went on, "what are those things but an attraction?" I saw how he had them, whatever they were, before him as he slowly shook his head. "They're not an attraction. They're too queer." I caught in an instant my way to fall in with him; and not the less that I by this time felt myself committed, up to the intellectual eyes, to ascertaining just _how_ queer the person under discussion might be. "Oh, of course I'm not speaking of her as a party to a silly flirtation, or an object of any sort of trivial pursuit. But there are so many different ways of being taken." "For a fellow like you. But not for a fellow like me. For me there's only one." "To be, you mean, in love?" He put it a little differently. "Well, to be thoroughly pleased."