"Well," I brought out at last, "I'm quite aching to ask you if you'll forgive me a great liberty, which I owe to your candid challenge my opportunity to name. Will you allow me to say frankly that I think you play a dangerous game with poor Briss, in whom I confess I'm interested? I don't of course speak of the least danger to yourself; but it's an injustice to any man to make use of him quite so flagrantly. You don't in the least flatter yourself that the poor fellow is in love with you--you wouldn't care a bit if he were. Yet you're willing to make him think you like him, so far as that may be necessary to explain your so frequently ingenious appropriation of him. He doesn't like you _too_ much, as yet; doesn't even like you quite enough. But your potency may, after all, work on him, and then, as your interest is so obviously quite elsewhere, what will happen will be that you'll find, to your inconvenience, that you've gone too far. A man never likes a woman enough unless he likes her _more_ than enough. Unfortunately it's what the inveterate ass is sure sooner or later to do."
Lady John looked just enough interested to look detached from most of the more vulgar liabilities to offence. "Do I understand that to be the pretty name by which you describe Mr. Briss?"
"He has his share of it, for I'm thinking of the idiots that we everyone of us are. I throw out a warning against a contingency."
"Are you providing for the contingency of his ceasing to care for his wife? If you are"--and Lady John's amusement took on a breadth--"you may be said to have a prudent mind and to be taking time by the forelock."
At this I pricked up my ears. "Do you mean because of his apparently incorruptible constancy?"
"I mean because the whole thing's so before one. She has him so in hand that they're neither of them in as much danger as would count for a mouse. It doesn't prevent his liking to dally by the way--for _she_ dallies by the way, and he does everything she does. Haven't I observed her," Lady John continued, "dallying a little, so far as that goes, with _you_? You've the tact to tell me that he doesn't think me good enough, but I don't require, do I?--for such a purpose as his--to be very extraordinarily good. You may say that you wrap it up immensely and try to sugar the dose! Well, all the same, give up, for a quiet life, the attempt to be a providence. You can't be a providence and not be a bore. A real providence _knows_; whereas you," said Lady John, making her point neatly, "have to find out--and to find out even by asking 'the likes of' _me_. Your fine speech meanwhile doesn't a bit tell me what."