gazer, in the still museum, before the named and dated object, the pride of the catalogue, that time has polished and consecrated.  Extraordinary, in particular, was the number of the different ways in which he thus affected her as showing.  He was strong—­that was the great thing.  He was sure—­sure for himself, always, whatever his idea:  the expression of that in him had somehow never appeared more identical with his proved taste for the rare and the true.  But what stood out beyond everything was that he was always, marvellously, young—­which couldn’t but crown, at this juncture, his whole appeal to her imagination.  Before she knew it she was lifted aloft by the consciousness that he was simply a great and deep and high little man, and that to love him with tenderness was not to be distinguished, a whit, from loving him with pride.  It came to her, all strangely, as a sudden, an immense relief.  The sense that he wasn’t a failure, and could never be, purged their predicament of every meanness—­ made it as if they had really emerged, in their transmuted union, to smile almost without pain.  It was like a new confidence, and after another instant she knew even still better why.  Wasn’t it because now, also, on his side, he was thinking of her as his daughter, was trying her, during these mute seconds, as the child of his blood?  Oh then, if she wasn’t with her little conscious passion, the child of any weakness, what was she but strong enough too?  It swelled in her, fairly; it raised her higher, higher:  she wasn’t in that case a failure either—­hadn’t been, but the contrary; his strength was her strength, her pride was his, and they were decent and competent together.  This was all in the answer she finally made him.

“I believe in you more than any one.”

“Than any one at all?”

She hesitated, for all it might mean; but there was—­oh a thousand times!—­no doubt of it.  “Than any one at all.”  She kept nothing of it back now, met his eyes over it, let him have the whole of it; after which she went on:  “And that’s the way, I think, you believe in me.”

He looked at her a minute longer, but his tone at last was right.  “About the way—­yes.”

“Well then—?” She spoke as for the end and for other matters—­ for anything, everything, else there might be.  They would never return to it.

“Well then—!” His hands came out, and while her own took them he drew her to his breast and held her.  He held her hard and kept her long, and she let herself go; but it was an embrace that, august and almost stern, produced, for all its intimacy, no revulsion and broke into no inconsequence of tears.

XXXVIII