That was what, while she watched herself, she potentially heard him bring out; and while she carried to an end another day, another sequence and yet another of their hours together, without his producing it, she felt herself occupied with him beyond even the intensity of surrender.  She was keeping her head, for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of this detachment, with the labour of her keeping the pitch of it down, held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which artless passion would have been but a beating of the air.  Her greatest danger, or at least her greatest motive for care, was the obsession of the thought that, if he actually did suspect, the fruit of his attention to her couldn’t help being a sense of the growth of her importance.  Taking the measure, with him, as she had taken it with her father, of the prescribed reach of her hypocrisy, she saw how it would have to stretch even to her seeking to prove that she was not, all the same, important.  A single touch from him—­oh, she should know it in case of its coming!—­any brush of his hand, of his lips, of his voice, inspired by recognition of her probable interest as distinct from pity for her virtual gloom, would hand her over to him bound hand and foot.  Therefore to be free, to be free to act, other than abjectly, for her father, she must conceal from him the validity that, like a microscopic insect pushing a grain of sand, she was taking on even for herself.  She could keep it up with a change in sight, but she couldn’t keep it up forever; so that, really, one extraordinary effect of their week of untempered confrontation, which bristled with new marks, was to make her reach out, in thought, to their customary companions and calculate the kind of relief that rejoining them would bring.  She was learning, almost from minute to minute, to be a mistress of shades since, always, when there were possibilities enough of intimacy, there were also, by that fact, in intercourse, possibilities of iridescence; but she was working against an adversary who was a master of shades too, and on whom, if she didn’t look out, she should presently have imposed a consciousness of the nature of their struggle.  To feel him in fact, to think of his feeling himself, her adversary in things of this fineness—­to see him at all, in short, brave a name that would represent him as in opposition—­ was already to be nearly reduced to a visible smothering of her cry of alarm.  Should he guess they were having, in their so occult manner, a high fight, and that it was she, all the while, in her supposed stupidity, who had made it high and was keeping it high—­in the event of his doing this before they could leave town she should verily be lost.