Definite it is then that, caught by his young friend in the fact of his _intelligent_ alarm he makes a clean breast to her of what he feels and understands, of what his intelligence most helps him to, of what, in a word, it is necessary that she shall know--know in order to assist and relieve him, do the particular thing that _will_ so act for him: and so bring the whole situation to the point of its dénoûment. What is then this particular thing?--what can it be when I bring it down to a finer point, that is bring the question down, than my general first notion brought it to? Here the very closest and finest logic must govern all one's sequences. Altogether important and indispensable is it that he doesn't "confess to her", really appeal and throw himself upon her, till she has so "caught", as I say, and cornered him, that there is nothing else for him to do--that is that under the pity and perception and beauty of this he absolutely can't but give in. I have provided above, or sought to, for the motive force establishing in her this capacity--I have sought to do so, I repeat, though I'm not sure I don't still feel a little uncomfortable at being able to do nothing better for her, as would appear, than simply recognise his woe. The beautiful thing would be for her to be able to _refer this woe_ to some particular, some portentous observation or constatation already made by him: which question I examined and turned over above without breaking down my objection to her directly sharing his vision: I at that point stated that I wished her but indirectly, but derivatively, to do that--through her apprehension of the state into which it has put him. I seem to feel that this then isn't quite ideally adequate or good without I know not what _more_ for her: the ability in her, say, to _challenge him first_ on some entirely concrete matter which has told her something for herself, something strange and prodigious, or at least deeply mystifying, in advance of the pressure brought to bear by her on him as an indicated, approved, a revealed sufferer, the pressure in fine that makes him break down. The trouble is that so I swing back again this way to too near the objection-ability, and thereby ask myself if there isn't a way out, a happy thought, in making her, instead of seeing something more than the normal, making her, as I have used the term, "catch", catch in the fact, something in excess of it, see something _less_, have the queerness of _missing_ something--her miss of which needs to be explained. The miss, as I call it, corresponds and matches with his exposure to the retributive visitation, as I have called it; and something glimmers out for me in the way of the very occurrence itself, the fact of the visitation for him being marked, marked startlingly and mystifyingly to her, not by his experience as in any degree detected by her, discernible to her, but by his apparent exclusion from _any_ experience; or in other words by an inexplicable lapse or suspension of his state of being at all. I think that if I can arrange that--her not finding him present when by all the laws and the logic of life he should _be_ present, and so having to challenge him for an explanation--in short I believe I do so see something. He is extinguished for her senses by being in the grip of his face-to-faceness with the other man; and don't I make it out as arrangeable that this takes place in the very fact of his having appointed a tryst or rendezvous with her, at which she has found him, but in the midst of which he then astoundingly fails and, as it were, evaporates? I seem to see something like her having gone out to him by appointment, at dusk of evening, in the Square, the enclosed square itself; where as she approaches she has recognised him within, has even spoken to him through the rails, while he awaits her, and there has had an exchanged word or two with her, directing her round to the gate: which she reaches and enters the enclosure by only to become sure, after moments and moments and moments of surprise and stupefaction, that he is definitely _not there._ I think I have it, it is then; it is at these moments, I mean during them, and under the "influence" exactly, upon the other man, of the appointment given her, that the "retributive visitation" takes place. So I get it, get it enough, get in fact all I need. The visitation over he is in the place again: he is there before her and what more natural "challenge" can I have for her than her alarmed question, that is her stupefied one, as to what in the world had during those moments, which I can make as long or as short, for intensity, as I like, what in the name of unanswerable wonder had become of him.
Literature Report
The Sense of the Past — Part 127
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