Having reached the station early, he had arrived at this point in his reflections before the increasing throng on the platform warned him that he could not hope to preserve his privacy; the next moment there was a hand on the door, and he turned to confront the very face he was fleeing.
Miss Bart, glowing with the haste of a precipitate descent upon the train, headed a group composed of the Dorsets, young Silverton and Lord Hubert Dacey, who had barely time to spring into the carriage, and envelop Selden in ejaculations of surprise and welcome, before the whistle of departure sounded. The party, it appeared, were hastening to Nice in response to a sudden summons to dine with the Duchess of Beltshire and to see the water-fete in the bay; a plan evidently improvised–in spite of Lord Hubert’s protesting “Oh, I say, you know,”–for the express purpose of defeating Mrs. Bry’s endeavour to capture the Duchess.
During the laughing relation of this manoeuvre, Selden had time for a rapid impression of Miss Bart, who had seated her self opposite to him in the golden afternoon light. Scarcely three months had elapsed since he had parted from her on the threshold of the Brys’ conservatory; but a subtle change had passed over the quality of her beauty. Then it had had a transparency through which the fluctuations of the spirit were sometimes tragically visible; now its impenetrable surface suggested a process of crystallization which had fused her whole being into one hard brilliant substance. The change had struck Mrs. Fisher as a rejuvenation: to Selden it seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm fluidity of youth is chilled into its final shape.
He felt it in the way she smiled on him, and in the readiness and competence with which, flung unexpectedly into his presence, she took up the thread of their intercourse as though that thread had not been snapped with a violence from which he still reeled. Such facility sickened him–but he told himself that it was with the pang which precedes recovery. Now he would really get well–would eject the last drop of poison from his blood. Already he felt himself calmer in her presence than he had learned to be in the thought of her. Her assumptions and elisions, her short-cuts and long detours, the skill with which she contrived to meet him at a point from which no inconvenient glimpses of the past were visible, suggested what opportunities she had had for practising such arts since their last meeting. He felt that she had at last arrived at an understanding with herself: had made a pact with her rebellious impulses, and achieved a uniform system of self-government, under which all vagrant tendencies were either held captive or forced into the service of the state.
And he saw other things too in her manner: saw how it had adjusted itself to the hidden intricacies of a situation in which, even after Mrs. Fisher’s elucidating flashes, he still felt himself agrope. Surely Mrs. Fisher could no longer charge Miss Bart with neglecting her opportunities! To Selden’s exasperated observation she was only too completely alive to them. She was “perfect” to every one: subservient to Bertha’s anxious predominance, good-naturedly watchful of Dorset’s moods, brightly companionable to Silverton and Dacey, the latter of whom met her on an evident footing of old admiration, while young Silverton, portentously self-absorbed, seemed conscious of her only as of something vaguely obstructive. And suddenly, as Selden noted the fine shades of manner by which she harmonized herself with her surroundings, it flashed on him that, to need such adroit handling, the situation must indeed be desperate. She was on the edge of something–that was the impression left with him. He seemed to see her poised on the brink of a chasm, with one graceful foot advanced to assert her unconsciousness that the ground was failing her.
On the Promenade des Anglais, where Ned Silverton hung on him for the half hour before dinner, he received a deeper impression of the general insecurity. Silverton was in a mood of Titanic pessimism. How any one could come to such a damned hole as the Riviera–any one with a grain of imagination–with the whole Mediterranean to choose from: but then, if one’s estimate of a place depended on the way they broiled a spring chicken! Gad! what a study might be made of the tyranny of the stomach–the way a sluggish liver or insufficient gastric juices might affect the whole course of the universe, overshadow everything in reach–chronic dyspepsia ought to be among the “statutory causes”; a woman’s life might be ruined by a man’s inability to digest fresh bread. Grotesque? Yes–and tragic–like most absurdities. There’s nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask…. Where was he? Oh–the reason they chucked Sicily and rushed back? Well–partly, no doubt, Miss Bart’s desire to get back to bridge and smartness. Dead as a stone to art and poetry–the light never was on sea or land for her! And of course she persuaded Dorset that the Italian food was bad for him. Oh, she could make him believe anything–anything! Mrs. Dorset was aware of it–oh, perfectly: nothing she didn’t see! But she could hold her tongue–she’d had to, often enough. Miss Bart was an intimate friend–she wouldn’t hear a word against her. Only it hurts a woman’s pride–there are some things one doesn’t get used to . . . All this in confidence, of course? Ah–and there were the ladies signalling from the balcony of the hotel…. He plunged across the Promenade, leaving Selden to a meditative cigar.