What this jerk represented was the spasm within
her of something still deeper than a moral sense. She looked at her
examiner; she looked at the visitors; she felt the rising of the tears
she had kept down at the station. They had nothing--no, distinctly
nothing--to do with her moral sense. The only thing was the old flat
shameful schoolroom plea. "I don't know--I don't know."
"Then you've lost it." Mrs. Wix seemed to close the book as she fixed
the straighteners on Sir Claude. "You've nipped it in the bud. You've
killed it when it had begun to live."
She was a newer Mrs. Wix than ever, a Mrs. Wix high and great; but Sir
Claude was not after all to be treated as a little boy with a missed
lesson. "I've not killed anything," he said; "on the contrary I think
I've produced life. I don't know what to call it--I haven't even known
how decently to deal with it, to approach it; but, whatever it is, it's
the most beautiful thing I've ever met--it's exquisite, it's sacred." He
had his hands in his pockets and, though a trace of the sickness he had
just shown perhaps lingered there, his face bent itself with
extraordinary gentleness on both the friends he was about to lose. "Do
you know what I came back for?" he asked of the elder.
"I think I do!" cried Mrs. Wix, surprisingly un-mollified and with the
heat of her late engagement with Mrs. Beale still on her brow. That
lady, as if a little besprinkled by such turns of the tide, uttered a
loud inarticulate protest and, averting herself, stood a moment at the
window.
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