She saw, too, with a very delicate pleasure, that he carried himself in his grave humility untouched and unconscious.  Expecting nothing, he was unaware that he received nothing.  It was odd, and in its way charming, that she who saw and knew drew from their mutual grievance a sense of pitiful protection for him, the unconscious one.  For herself, the tide that bore her on was too deep to let these things hurt her; she looked down and saw the soreness and humiliation of them pictorially, at the bottom, gliding smoothly over.  They brought no stereotype to her smile, no dissonance to what she found to say.  When at last she and Arnold sat down together her standpoint was still superior, and she herself was so aloof from it all that she could talk about it without bitterness, divorcing the personal pang from a social manifestation of some dramatic value.  In offering up her egotism that way she really only made more subtle sacrifices to it, but one could hardly expect such a consideration, just then, to give her pause.  She anointed his eyelids, she made him see, and he was relieved to find in her light comment that she took the typical Mrs. Winstick less seriously than he had supposed when they drove away from the Livingstones’.  It could not occur to him to correct the impression he had then by the sound of his own voice uttering sympathy.

“But I know now what a wave feels like dashing against a cliff,” she said.  “Fancy my thinking I could impose myself!  That is the wave’s reflection.”

“It goes back into the sea, which is its own; and there,” said the priest, whom nature had somehow cheated by the false promise of high moralities out of an inheritance of beauty, “and there, I think, is depth and change and mystery, with joy in the obedience of the tides and a full beating upon many shores——­”

“Ah, my sea!  I hear it calling always, even,” she said half-reflectively, “when I am talking to you.  But sometimes I think I am not a wave at all, only a shell, to be stranded and left, always with the calling in my ears”—­she seemed to have dropped altogether into reverie, and then looked up suddenly, laughing, because he could not understand.

“After all,” she said practically, “what has that to do with it?  One doesn’t blame these people.  They are stupid—­that’s all.  They want the obvious.  The leading lady of Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope—­without the smallest diamond—­who does song and dance on Saturday nights—­what can you expect.  If I were famous they would be pleased enough to see me.  It is one of the rewards of the fame.”  She was silent for a moment, and then she added, “They are very poor.”

“Those rewards!  I have sometimes thought,” Arnold said, “that you were not devoured by thirst for them.”

“When we are together, you and I,” she answered simply, “I never am.”