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.

It was her one purely good fortune that she could feel thus sure impertinence—­to her at any rate—­was not among the arts on which he proposed to throw himself; for though he had, in so almost mystifying a manner, replied to nothing, denied nothing, explained nothing, apologised for nothing, he had somehow conveyed to her that this was not because of any determination to treat her case as not “worth” it.  There had been consideration, on both occasions, in the way he had listened to her—­even though at the same time there had been extreme reserve; a reserve indeed, it was also to be remembered, qualified by the fact that, on their second and shorter interview, in Portland Place, and quite at the end of this passage, she had imagined him positively proposing to her a temporary accommodation.  It had been but the matter of something in the depths of the eyes he finally fixed upon her, and she had found in it, the more she kept it before her, the tacitly-offered sketch of a working arrangement.  “Leave me my reserve; don’t question it—­it’s