In a sense, of course, it was true that he had, as Frederica would have
put it, forgotten she was there--had forgotten, at least, who she was.
Because, if he had remembered that she was just a young girl in the
university, he would hardly, as he tramped about the room expounding the
practise of criminal law in the state's attorney's office, have
characterized the state's attorney himself as a "damned gallery-playing
mountebank," nor have described the professions and the misdeeds of
some of the persons he prosecuted in blunt Anglo-Saxon terms she had
never heard used except in the Bible.
The girl knew he had forgotten, and her only discomfort came from the
fear that the spell might be broken and he remember suddenly and be
embarrassed and stop.
In the deeper sense--and she was breathlessly conscious of this too--he
hadn't forgotten she was there. He was telling it all because she was
there--because she was herself and nobody else. She knew, though how she
couldn't have explained,--with that intuitive certainty that is the only
real certainty there is,--that the story couldn't have been evoked from
him in just that way, by any one else in the world.
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