So far as it took place it was of a "subtlety," as we used to say at Newmarch, in relation to which the common register of that pressure would have been, I fear, too old-fashioned a barometer. I had moreover the comfort--for it amounted to that--of perceiving after a little that we understood each other too well for our understanding really to have tolerated the interference of passion, such passion as would have been represented on his side by resentment of my intelligence and on my side by resentment of his. The high sport of such intelligence--between gentlemen, to the senses of any other than whom it must surely be closed--demanded and implied in its own intimate interest a certain amenity. Yes, accordingly, I had promptly got the answer that my wonder at his approach required: he had come to me for the high sport. He would formerly have been incapable of it, and he was beautifully capable of it now. It was precisely the kind of high sport--the play of perception, expression, sociability--in which Mrs. Server would a year or two before have borne as light a hand. I need scarcely add how little it would have found itself in that lady's present chords. He had said to me in our ten minutes everything amusing she couldn't have said. Yet if when our host gave us the sign to adjourn to the drawing-room so much as all this had grown so much clearer, I had still, figuratively speaking, a small nut or two left to crack. By the time we moved away together, however, these resistances had yielded. The answers had really only been waiting for the questions. The play of Long's mind struck me as more marked, since the morning, by the same amount, as it might have been called, as the march of poor Briss's age; and if I had, a while before, in the wood, had my explanation of this latter addition, so I had it now of the former--as to which I shall presently give it.