《两个魔法：螺丝在拧紧，覆盖结尾》

XXII

Alone at last with Miles, the governess feels the great pinch arrive. The carriage has barely rolled out of the gates before she perceives that what she has won is a measure of her own isolation. The household stares at the unexplained departure; the maids and men look blank, and she musters all her dignity to bear the crisis. She wanders the house looking ready for any onset.

Miles does not appear until dinner. He has breakfasted with Mrs. Grose and Flora and then gone out for a stroll, a frank expression of his new view of his office. The fiction that she has anything more to teach him has collapsed; their relation has shifted. When at last he joins her in the dining room, the ponderous pomp of the place presses upon her, and she feels again how much her equilibrium depends on the rigid will to shut her eyes to the truth of what she is dealing with.

They eat in nearly total silence. She dismisses the maid, and when she and Miles are alone he stands with his hands in his pockets, looking out the wide window through which she once glimpsed something that pulled her up. At length he turns back to her. “Well—so we’re alone!”

XXIII

The fire had died to embers in the grate, and the November dusk pressed against the great window of the schoolroom, but neither the governess nor the boy by the hearth seemed to notice. Miles stood planted before her with his hands stuffed into his pockets, looking, as he so often did, like some miniature gentleman puzzling out a problem in a world grown suddenly too large. She had asked him something about companionship, about whether he ever felt the lack of others in their sequestered life, and he had answered with a candor that made her smile falter on her lips. “They don’t much count, do they?” he said of the absent servants, of Flora, of all the busy mediocrity that surrounded them. And when she pressed him on what he meant by “much,” he wheeled away to the window and pressed his forehead against the cold pane, contemplating the stupid shrubs she knew so well and the dull flat things of November.

From the sofa where she had retreated behind the hypocrisy of her work, she watched the narrow line of his back and felt an extraordinary conviction steal over her: for the first time in the whole bewildering business, it was he who was shut in or shut out, not she. The windowpane, haunted though she knew it to be, seemed to mirror for him some failure of his own, some lapse in the strange vigilance he had kept up so bravely. He had been anxious all day, polishing his small terrors with that prodigious little genius of his, and now at last that genius faltered. He turned back to her with an air almost of surrender. “Well, I think I’m glad Bly agrees with me!”