Now that he was actually before her again, he became, as usual, the one live spot in her consciousness.  Once more her tormented throbbing self sank back passive and numb, but now withall its power of suffering mysteriously transferred to the presence, so known, yet so unknown, at the opposite corner of herhearth.  She was still Lizzie West, and he was still Vincent Deering; but the Styx rolled between them, and she saw his face through its fog.  It was his face, really, rather than his words, that told her, as she furtively studied it, the tale of failure and slow discouragement which had so blurred its handsome lines.  Shekept afterward no precise memory of the actual details of his narrative:  the pain it evidently cost him to impart it was so much the sharpest fact in her new vision of him.  Confusedly, however, she gathered that on reaching America he had found his wife’s small property gravely impaired; and that, while lingering on to securewhat remained of it, he had contrived to sell a picture or two, and had even known a brief moment of success, during which he received orders and set up a studio.  But inexplicably the tide had ebbed, his work remained on his hands, and a tedious illness, with its miserable sequel of debt, soon wiped out his small advantage.  There followed a period of eclipse, still more vaguely pictured, during which she was allowed to infer that he had tried his hand at divers means of livelihood, accepting employment from a fashionable house-decorator, designing wall-papers, illustrating magazine articles, and acting for a time, she dimly understood, as the social tout of a new hotel desirous of advertising its restaurant.  These disjointed facts were strung on a slender thread of personal allusions—­references to friends who had been kind (jealously, she guessed them to be women), and to enemies who had darkly schemed against him.  But, true to his tradition of “correctness,” he carefully avoided the mention of names, and left her trembling conjectures to grope dimly through an alien crowded world in which there seemed little room for her small shy presence.

As she listened, her private pang was merged in the intolerable sense of his unhappiness.  Nothing he had said explained or excused his conduct to her; but he had suffered, he had been lonely, had been humiliated, and she suddenly felt, with a fierce maternal rage, that there was no conceivable justification for any scheme of things in which such facts were possible.  She could not have said why:  she simply knew that it hurt too much tosee him hurt.

Gradually it came to her that her unconsciousness of any personal grievance was due to her having so definitely determinedher own future.  She was glad she had decided, as she now felt she had, to marry Jackson Benn, if only for the sense of detachment it gave her in dealing with the case of Vincent Deering.  Her personal safety insured her the requisite impartiality, and justified her in dwelling as long as she chose