Maggie had liked her to understand, so far as this was possible; but had not been slow to see afterwards how the possibility was limited, when one came to think, by mysteries she was not to sound.  This inability in her was indeed not remarkable, inasmuch as the Princess herself, as we have seen, was only now in a position to boast of touching bottom.  Maggie lived, inwardly, in a consciousness that she could but partly open even to so good a friend, and her own visitation of the fuller expanse of which was, for that matter, still going on.  They had been duskier still, however, these recesses of her imagination—­that, no doubt, was what might at present be said for them.  She had looked into them, on the eve of her leaving town, almost without penetration:  she had made out in those hours, and also, of a truth, during the days which immediately followed, little more than the strangeness of a relation having for its chief mark—­ whether to be prolonged or not—­the absence of any “intimate” result of the crisis she had invited her husband to recognise.  They had dealt with this crisis again, face to face, very briefly, the morning after the scene in her room—­but with the odd consequence of her having appeared merely to leave it on his hands.  He had received it from her as he might have received a bunch of keys or a list of commissions—­attentive to her instructions about them, but only putting them, for the time, very carefully and safely, into his pocket.  The instructions had seemed, from day to day, to make so little difference for his behaviour—­that is for his speech or his silence; to produce, as yet, so little of the fruit of action.  He had taken from her, on the spot, in a word, before going to dress for dinner, all she then had to give—­after which, on the morrow, he had asked her for more, a good deal as if she might have renewed her supply during the night; but he had had at his command for this latter purpose an air of extraordinary detachment and discretion, an air amounting really to an appeal which, if she could have brought herself to describe it vulgarly, she would have described as cool, just as he himself would have described it in any one else as “cheeky”; a suggestion that she should trust him on the particular ground since she didn’t on the general.  Neither his speech nor his silence struck her as signifying more, or less, under this pressure, than they had seemed to signify for weeks past; yet if her sense hadn’t been absolutely closed to the possibility in him of any thought of wounding her, she might have taken his undisturbed manner, the perfection of his appearance of having recovered himself, for one of those intentions of high impertinence by the aid of which great people, les grands seigneurs, persons of her husband’s class and type, always know how to re-establish a violated order.