Upstairs, while she left him to put on something to go out in, the thought of his waiting below for her, in possession of the empty house, brought with it, sharply if briefly, one of her abrupt arrests of consistency, the brush of a vain imagination almost paralysing her, often, for the minute, before her glass—­ the vivid look, in other words, of the particular difference his marriage had made.  The particular difference seemed at such instants the loss, more than anything else, of their old freedom, their never having had to think, where they were together concerned, of any one, of anything but each other.  It hadn’t been her marriage that did it; that had never, for three seconds, suggested to either of them that they must act diplomatically, must reckon with another presence—­no, not even with her husband’s.  She groaned to herself, while the vain imagination lasted, “Why did he marry? ah, why did he?” and then it came up to her more than ever that nothing could have been more beautiful than the way in which, till Charlotte came so much more closely into their life, Amerigo hadn’t interfered.  What she had gone on owing him for this mounted up again, to her eyes, like a column of figures—–­or call it even, if one would, a house of cards; it was her father’s wonderful act that had tipped the house down and made the sum wrong.  With all of which, immediately after her question, her “Why did he, why did he?” rushed back, inevitably, the confounding, the overwhelming wave of the knowledge of his reason.  “He did it for me, he did it for me,” she moaned, “he did it, exactly, that our freedom—­meaning, beloved man, simply and solely mine—­should be greater instead of less; he did it, divinely, to liberate me so far as possible from caring what became of him.”  She found time upstairs, even in her haste, as she had repeatedly found time before, to let the wonderments involved in these recognitions flash at her with their customary effect of making her blink:  the question in especial of whether she might find her solution in acting, herself, in the spirit of what he had done, in forcing her “care” really to grow as much less as he had tried to make it.  Thus she felt the whole weight of their case drop afresh upon her shoulders, was confronted, unmistakably, with the prime source of her haunted state.  It all came from her not having been able not to mind—­not to mind what became of him; not having been able, without anxiety, to let him go his way and take his risk and lead his life.  She had made anxiety her stupid little idol; and absolutely now, while she stuck a long pin, a trifle fallaciously, into her hat—­she had, with an approach to irritation, told her maid, a new woman, whom she had lately found herself thinking of as abysmal, that she didn’t want her—­she tried to focus the possibility of some understanding between them in consequence of which he should cut loose.