“That’s a polite way of calling me a fool,” said Pickering.  “You are a sceptic, a cynic, a satirist!  I hope I shall be a long time coming to that.”

“You will make the journey fast if you travel by express trains.  But pray tell me, have you ventured to intimate to Madame Blumenthal your high opinion of her?”

“I don’t know what I may have said.  She listens even better than she talks, and I think it possible I may have made her listen to a great deal of nonsense.  For after the first few words I exchanged with her I was conscious of an extraordinary evaporation of all my old diffidence.  I have, in truth, I suppose,” he added in a moment, “owing to my peculiar circumstances, a great accumulated fund of unuttered things of all sorts to get rid of.  Last evening, sitting there before that charming woman, they came swarming to my lips.  Very likely I poured them all out.  I have a sense of having enshrouded myself in a sort of mist of talk, and of seeing her lovely eyes shining through it opposite to me, like fog-lamps at sea.”  And here, if I remember rightly, Pickering broke off into an ardent parenthesis, and declared that Madame Blumenthal’s eyes had something in them that he had never seen in any others.  “It was a jumble of crudities and inanities,” he went on; “they must have seemed to her great rubbish; but I felt the wiser and the stronger, somehow, for having fired off all my guns—­they could hurt nobody now if they hit—­and I imagine I might have gone far without finding another woman in whom such an exhibition would have provoked so little of mere cold amusement.”

“Madame Blumenthal, on the contrary,” I surmised, “entered into your situation with warmth.”

“Exactly so—­the greatest!  She has felt and suffered, and now she understands!”

“She told you, I imagine, that she understood you as if she had made you, and she offered to be your guide, philosopher, and friend.”

“She spoke to me,” Pickering answered, after a pause, “as I had never been spoken to before, and she offered me, formally, all the offices of a woman’s friendship.”

“Which you as formally accepted?”

“To you the scene sounds absurd, I suppose, but allow me to say I don’t care!” Pickering spoke with an air of genial defiance which was the most inoffensive thing in the world.  “I was very much moved; I was, in fact, very much excited.  I tried to say something, but I couldn’t; I had had plenty to say before, but now I stammered and bungled, and at last I bolted out of the room.”

“Meanwhile she had dropped her tragedy into your pocket!”

“Not at all.  I had seen it on the table before she came in.  Afterwards she kindly offered to read German aloud with me, for the accent, two or three times a week.  ‘What shall we begin with?’ she asked.  ‘With this!’ I said, and held up the book.  And she let me take it to look it over.”