He allowed for himself, but she, exactly, allowed still more;
partly because, better placed for a sight of the matter, she traced
his unhappy perversion through reaches of its course into which he
could scarce follow it. He knew how he felt, but, besides knowing
that, she knew how he looked as well; he knew each of the things of
importance he was insidiously kept from doing, but she could add up
the amount they made, understand how much, with a lighter weight on
his spirit, he might have done, and thereby establish how, clever
as he was, he fell short. Above all she was in the secret of the
difference between the forms he went through--those of his little
office under Government, those of caring for his modest patrimony,
for his library, for his garden in the country, for the people in
London whose invitations he accepted and repaid--and the detachment
that reigned beneath them and that made of all behaviour, all that
could in the least be called behaviour, a long act of
dissimulation. What it had come to was that he wore a mask painted
with the social simper, out of the eye-holes of which there looked
eyes of an expression not in the least matching the other features.
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