knew, besides, you knew to-day, I would come.  And if you knew that you know everything.”  So she pursued, and if he didn’t meanwhile, if he didn’t even at this, take her up, it might be that she was so positively fitting him again with the fair face of temporising kindness that he had given her, to keep her eyes on, at the other important juncture, and the sense of which she might ever since have been carrying about with her like a precious medal—­not exactly blessed by the Pope suspended round her neck.  She had come back, however this might be, to her immediate account of herself, and no mention of their great previous passage was to rise to the lips of either.  “Above all,” she said, “there has been the personal romance of it.”

“Of tea with me over the fire?  Ah, so far as that goes I don’t think even my intelligence fails me.”

“Oh, it’s further than that goes; and if I’ve had a better day than you it’s perhaps, when I come to think of it, that I am braver.  You bore yourself, you see.  But I don’t.  I don’t, I don’t,” she repeated.

“It’s precisely boring one’s self without relief,” he protested, “that takes courage.”

“Passive then—­not active.  My romance is that, if you want to know, I’ve been all day on the town.  Literally on the town—­isn’t that what they call it?  I know how it feels.”  After which, as if breaking off, “And you, have you never been out?” she asked.

He still stood there with his hands in his pockets.  “What should I have gone out for?”

“Oh, what should people in our case do anything for?  But you’re wonderful, all of you—­you know how to live.  We’re clumsy brutes, we other’s, beside you—­we must always be ‘doing’ something.  However,” Charlotte pursued, “if you had gone out you might have missed the chance of me—­which I’m sure, though you won’t confess it, was what you didn’t want; and might have missed, above all, the satisfaction that, look blank about it as you will, I’ve come to congratulate you on.  That’s really what I can at last do.  You can’t not know at least, on such a day as this—­you can’t not know,” she said, “where you are.”  She waited as for him either to grant that he knew or to pretend that he didn’t; but he only drew a long deep breath which came out like a moan of impatience.  It brushed aside the question of where he was or what he knew; it seemed to keep the ground clear for the question of his visitor herself, that of Charlotte Verver exactly as she sat there.  So, for some moments, with their long look, they but treated the matter in silence; with the effect indeed, by the end of the time, of having considerably brought it on.  This was sufficiently marked in what Charlotte next said.  “There it all is—­ extraordinary beyond words.  It makes such a relation for us as, I verily believe, was never before in the world thrust upon two well-meaning creatures.  Haven’t we therefore to take things as we find them?” She put the question