For after the first few words I exchanged with her I was
conscious of an extraordinary evaporation of all my old diffidence. I
have, in truth, I suppose," he added in a moment, "owing to my peculiar
circumstances, a great accumulated fund of unuttered things of all sorts
to get rid of. Last evening, sitting there before that charming woman,
they came swarming to my lips. Very likely I poured them all out. I
have a sense of having enshrouded myself in a sort of mist of talk, and
of seeing her lovely eyes shining through it opposite to me, like fog-
lamps at sea." And here, if I remember rightly, Pickering broke off into
an ardent parenthesis, and declared that Madame Blumenthal's eyes had
something in them that he had never seen in any others. "It was a jumble
of crudities and inanities," he went on; "they must have seemed to her
great rubbish; but I felt the wiser and the stronger, somehow, for having
fired off all my guns--they could hurt nobody now if they hit--and I
imagine I might have gone far without finding another woman in whom such
an exhibition would have provoked so little of mere cold amusement."
"Madame Blumenthal, on the contrary," I surmised, "entered into your
situation with warmth."
"Exactly so--the greatest! She has felt and suffered, and now she
understands!"
"She told you, I imagine, that she understood you as if she had made you,
and she offered to be your guide, philosopher, and friend.
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