Why otherwise, with such an opportunity, hadn't he demanded it?
Always from calculation--that was why, that was why.

He was terrified of the retort he might have invoked: "What, my dear, if you come to that, is the matter with YOU ?" When, a minute later on, he had followed up his last note by a touch or two designed still further to conjure away the ghost of the anomalous, at that climax verily she would have had to be dumb to the question.

"There seems a kind of charm, doesn't there?
on our life--and quite as if, just lately, it had got itself somehow renewed, had waked up refreshed.

A kind of wicked selfish prosperity perhaps, as if we had grabbed everything, fixed everything, down to the last lovely object for the last glass case of the last corner, left over, of my old show.

That's the only take-off, that it has made us perhaps lazy, a wee bit languid--lying like gods together, all careless of mankind." "Do you consider that we're languid ?"--that form of rejoinder she had jumped at for the sake of its pretty lightness.