The Blunt atmosphere seemed to vibrate all over my skin.  I disregarded the symptom.  “Madame,” I said, “I have never tried to find out what sort of being I am.”

“Ah, that’s very wrong.  We ought to reflect on what manner of beings we are.  Of course we are all sinners.  My John is a sinner like the others,” she declared further, with a sort of proud tenderness as though our common lot must have felt honoured and to a certain extent purified by this condescending recognition.

“You are too young perhaps as yet . . .  But as to my John,” she broke off, leaning her elbow on the table and supporting her head on her old, impeccably shaped, white fore-arm emerging from a lot of precious, still older, lace trimming the short sleeve.  “The trouble is that he suffers from a profound discord between the necessary reactions to life and even the impulses of nature and the lofty idealism of his feelings; I may say, of his principles.  I assure you that he won’t even let his heart speak uncontradicted.”

I am sure I don’t know what particular devil looks after the associations of memory, and I can’t even imagine the shock which it would have been for Mrs. Blunt to learn that the words issuing from her lips had awakened in me the visual perception of a dark-skinned, hard-driven lady’s maid with tarnished eyes; even of the tireless Rose handing me my hat while breathing out the enigmatic words:  “Madame should listen to her heart.”  A wave from the atmosphere of another house rolled in, overwhelming and fiery, seductive and cruel, through the Blunt vibration, bursting through it as through tissue paper and filling my heart with sweet murmurs and distracting images, till it seemed to break, leaving an empty stillness in my breast.

After that for a long time I heard Mme. Blunt mere talking with extreme fluency and I even caught the individual words, but I could not in the revulsion of my feelings get hold of the sense.  She talked apparently of life in general, of its difficulties, moral and physical, of its surprising turns, of its unexpected contacts, of the choice and rare personalities that drift on it as if on the sea; of the distinction that letters and art gave to it, the nobility and consolations there are in aesthetics, of the privileges they confer on individuals and (this was the first connected statement I caught) that Mills agreed with her in the general point of view as to the inner worth of individualities and in the particular instance of it on which she had opened to him her innermost heart.  Mills had a universal mind.  His sympathy was universal, too.  He had that large comprehension—­oh, not cynical, not at all cynical, in fact rather tender—­which was found in its perfection only in some rare, very rare Englishmen.  The dear creature was romantic, too.  Of course he was reserved in his speech but she understood Mills perfectly.  Mills apparently liked me very much.