He
circled about it at a distance that alternately narrowed and
widened and that still wasn't much affected by the consciousness in
him that there was nothing she could "know," after all, any better
than he did. She had no source of knowledge he hadn't equally--
except of course that she might have finer nerves. That was what
women had where they were interested; they made out things, where
people were concerned, that the people often couldn't have made out
for themselves. Their nerves, their sensibility, their
imagination, were conductors and revealers, and the beauty of May
Bartram was in particular that she had given herself so to his
case. He felt in these days what, oddly enough, he had never felt
before, the growth of a dread of losing her by some catastrophe--
some catastrophe that yet wouldn't at all be the catastrophe:
partly because she had almost of a sudden begun to strike him as
more useful to him than ever yet, and partly by reason of an
appearance of uncertainty in her health, co-incident and equally
new. It was characteristic of the inner detachment he had hitherto
so successfully cultivated and to which our whole account of him is
a reference, it was characteristic that his complications, such as
they were, had never yet seemed so as at this crisis to thicken
about him, even to the point of making him ask himself if he were,
by any chance, of a truth, within sight or sound, within touch or
reach, within the immediate jurisdiction, of the thing that waited.
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