V

Summary

“We seem to have got so beautifully used to it,” Traffle remarked more than a month later to Jane—“we seemed to have lived into it and through it so, and to have suffered and surmounted the worst, that, upon my word, I scarce see what's the matter now, or what, that's so very dreadful, it's doing or has done for us. We haven't the interest of her, no,” he had gone on, slowly pacing and revolving things according to his wont, while the sharer of his life, tea being over and the service removed, reclined on a sofa, perfectly still and with her eyes rigidly closed; “we’ve lost that, and I agree that it was great—I mean the interest of the number of ideas the situation presented us with. That has dropped—by our own act, evidently; we must have simply settled the case, a month ago, in such a way as that we shall have no more acquaintance with it; by which I mean no more of the fun of it. I, for one, confess I miss the fun—put it only at the fun of our having had to wriggle so with shame, or, call it if you like, to live so under arms, against prying questions and the too easy exposure of our false explanations; which only proves, however, that, as I say, the worst that has happened to us appears to be that we’re going to find life tame again—as tame as it was before ever Mora came into it so immensely to enrich and agitate it. She has gone out of it, obviously, to leave it flat and forlorn—tasteless after having had for so many months the highest flavour. If, by her not thanking you even though she declines, by her not acknowledging in any way your—as I admit—altogether munificent offer, it seems indicated that we should hold her to have definitely enrolled herself in the deplorable ‘flaunting’ class, we must at least recognise that she doesn't flaunt at us, at whomever else she may; and that she has in short cut us as neatly and effectively as, in the event of her conclusive, her supreme contumacy, we could have aspired to cut her.