THE SACRED FOUNT
me and with what possibilities it mingled. "I remember what you said of her yesterday."
I drew him on so that I brought back for him the very words he had used. "She was so beastly unhappy." And he used them now visibly not as a remembrance of what he had said, but for the contrast of the fact with what he at present perceived; so that the value this gave for me to what he at present perceived was immense.
"And do you mean that that's gone?"
He hung fire, however, a little as to saying so much what he meant, and while he waited he again looked at me. "What do you mean? Don't you think so yourself?"
I laid my hand on his arm and held him a moment with a grip that betrayed, I daresay, the effort in me to keep my thoughts together and lose not a thread. It betrayed at once, doubtless, the danger of that failure and the sharp foretaste of success. I remember that with it, absolutely, I struck myself as knowing again the joy of the intellectual mastery of things unamenable, that joy of determining, almost of creating results, which I have already mentioned as an exhilaration attached to some of my plunges of insight. "It would take long to tell you what I mean."
The tone of it made him fairly watch me as I had been watching him. "Well, haven't we got the whole night?"
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