[Issue-tracker-bugs] " I said, "when he stood before you there,

[Cansino <bri...@ad...>]

Othing else but wonder too. But I did not tell her that. I only smiled.
The material point was that Captain Anthony should be told everything.
But as to that I was very certain that the good sister would see to it.
Was there anything more to disclose--some other misery, some other
deception of which that girl had been a victim? It seemed hardly
probable. It was not even easy to imagine. What struck me most was
her--I suppose I must call it-- composure. One could not tell whether
she understood what she had done. One wondered. She was not so much
unreadable as blank; and I did not know whether to admire her for it or
dismiss her from my thoughts as a passive butt of ferocious misfortune.
Looking back at the occasion when we first got on speaking terms on the
road by the quarry, I had to admit that she presented some points of a
problematic appearance. I don't know why I imagined Captain Anthony as
the sort of man who would not be likely to take the initiative; not
perhaps from indifference but from that peculiar timidity before women
which often enough is found in conjunction with chivalrous instincts,
with a great need for affection and great stability of feelings. Such
men are easily moved. At the least encouragement they go forward with
the eagerness, with the recklessness of starvation. This accounted for
the suddenness of the affair. No! With all her inexperience this girl
could not have found any great difficulty in her conquering enterprise.
She must have begun it. And yet there she was, patient, almost unmoved,
almost pitiful, waiting outside like a beggar, without a right to
anything but compassion, for a promised dole. Every moment people were
passing close by us, singly, in two and threes; the inhabitants of that
end of the town where life goes on unadorned by grace or splendour; they
passed us in their shabby garments, with sallow faces, haggard, anxious
or weary, or simply without expression, in an unsmiling sombre stream
not made up of lives but of mere unconsidered existences whose joys,
struggles, thoughts, sorrows and their very hopes were miserable,
glamourless, and of no account in the world. And when one thought of
their reality to themselves one's heart beca