“I’ll do anything you like,” she said to her husband on one of the last days of the month, “if our being here, this way at this time, seems to you too absurd, or too uncomfortable, or too impossible.  We’ll either take leave of them now, without waiting—­or we’ll come back in time, three days before they start.  I’ll go abroad with you, if you but say the word; to Switzerland, the Tyrol, the Italian Alps, to whichever of your old high places you would like most to see again—­those beautiful ones that used to do you good after Rome and that you so often told me about.”

Where they were, in the conditions that prompted this offer, and where it might indeed appear ridiculous that, with the stale London September close at hand, they should content themselves with remaining, was where the desert of Portland Place looked blank as it had never looked, and where a drowsy cabman, scanning the horizon for a fare, could sink to oblivion of the risks of immobility.  But Amerigo was of the odd opinion, day after day, that their situation couldn’t be bettered; and he even went at no moment through the form of replying that, should their ordeal strike her as exceeding their patience, any step they might take would be for her own relief.  This was, no doubt, partly because he stood out so wonderfully, to the end, against admitting, by a weak word at least, that any element of their existence was, or ever had been, an ordeal; no trap of circumstance, no lapse of “form,” no accident of irritation, had landed him in that inconsequence.  His wife might verily have suggested that he was consequent—­consequent with the admirable appearance he had from the first so undertaken, and so continued, to present—­rather too rigidly at her expense; only, as it happened, she was not the little person to do anything of the sort, and the strange tacit compact actually in operation between them might have been founded on an intelligent comparison, a definite collation positively, of the kinds of patience proper to each.  She was seeing him through—­he had engaged to come out at the right end if she would see him:  this understanding, tacitly renewed from week to week, had fairly received, with the procession of the weeks, the consecration of time; but it scarce needed to be insisted on that she was seeing him on his terms, not all on hers, or that, in other words, she must allow him his unexplained and uncharted, his one practicably workable way.  If that way, by one of the intimate felicities the liability to which was so far from having even yet completely fallen from him, happened handsomely to show him as more bored than boring (with advantages of his own freely to surrender, but none to be persuadedly indebted to others for,) what did such a false face of the matter represent but the fact itself that she was pledged?  If she had questioned or challenged or interfered—­if she had reserved herself that right—­she wouldn’t have been pledged; whereas there were still, and evidently would be yet a while, long, tense stretches during which their case might have been hanging, for every eye, on her possible, her impossible defection.  She must keep it up to the last, mustn’t absent herself for three minutes from her post:  only on those lines, assuredly, would she show herself as with him and not against him.