Whenever he saw them together he was always much tempted to
observe them. And he yielded to the temptation. The fact of one's
life depending on the phases of an obscure action authorizes a certain
latitude of behaviour. He had seen them together repeatedly, communing
openly or apart, and there was in their way of joining each other,
in their poses and their ways of separating, something special and
characteristic and pertaining to themselves only, as if they had been
made for each other.
What he couldn't understand was why Mrs. Travers should have put off his
natural curiosity as to her latest conference with the Man of Fate by
an incredible statement as to the nature of the conversation. Talk about
dresses, opera, people's names. He couldn't take this seriously. She
might have invented, he thought, something more plausible; or simply
have told him that this was not for him to know. She ought to have known
that he would not have been offended. Couldn't she have seen already
that he accepted the complexion of mystery in her relation to that man
completely, unquestionably; as though it had been something preordained
from the very beginning of things? But he was not annoyed with Mrs.
Travers. After all it might have been true. She would talk exactly as
she liked, and even incredibly, if it so pleased her, and make the man
hang on her lips.
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