He had instantly told Gwendolen, but Gwendolen's ardent
response was in itself a pledge of discretion. The question would
now absorb them and would offer them a pastime too precious to be
shared with the crowd. They appeared to have caught instinctively
at Vereker's high idea of enjoyment. Their intellectual pride,
however, was not such as to make them indifferent to any further
light I might throw on the affair they had in hand. They were
indeed of the "artistic temperament," and I was freshly struck with
my colleague's power to excite himself over a question of art.
He'd call it letters, he'd call it life, but it was all one thing.
In what he said I now seemed to understand that he spoke equally
for Gwendolen, to whom, as soon as Mrs. Erme was sufficiently
better to allow her a little leisure, he made a point of
introducing me. I remember our going together one Sunday in August
to a huddled house in Chelsea, and my renewed envy of Corvick's
possession of a friend who had some light to mingle with his own.
He could say things to her that I could never say to him. She had
indeed no sense of humour and, with her pretty way of holding her
head on one side, was one of those persons whom you want, as the
phrase is, to shake, but who have learnt Hungarian by themselves.
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