_Something_ had been at work in the conversation, making it all so easy to recover. Vanity? The relief of tackling the big man? Not altogether. Because there had been moments of thinking of death. Glad death if the truth could _once_ be stated. Disinterested rejoicing in the fact that a man who talked to so many people was hearing _something_ about the world of women. And if anyone had been there to express it better, the relief would have been there, just the same, without jealousy. But what an unconscious compliment to men, to feel that it mattered whether or no they understood anything about the world of women.... The remaining days of the visit had glowed with the sense of the beginning of a new relationship with the Wilsons. The enchantment that surrounded her each time she went to see them and always as the last hours went by, grew oppressive with the reminder of its impermanence, shone, at last, wide over the future. The end of a visit would never again bring the certainty of being finally committed to an overwhelming combination of poverties, cut off, by an all-round ineligibility, from the sun-bathed seaward garden, the joyful brilliant seaside light pouring through the various bright interiors of the perfect little house; the inexpressible _charm_, always renewed, and remaining, however deeply she felt at variance with the Wilson reading of life, the topmost radiance of her social year; ignored and forgotten nearly all the time, but shining out whenever she chanced to look round at the resources of her outside life, a bright enduring pinnacle, whose removal would level the landscape to a rolling plain, its modest hillocks, easy to climb, robbed of their light, the bright reflection that came, she half-angrily admitted, from this central height.