all I have, just now, don’t you see? so that,
if you’ll make me the concession of letting
me alone with it for as long a time as I require, I
promise you something or other, grown under cover of
it, even though I don’t yet quite make out what,
as a return for your patience.” She had
turned away from him with some such unspoken words
as that in her ear, and indeed she had to represent
to herself that she had spiritually heard them, had
to listen to them still again, to explain her particular
patience in face of his particular failure. He
hadn’t so much as pretended to meet for an instant
the question raised by her of her accepted ignorance
of the point in time, the period before their own
marriage, from which his intimacy with Charlotte dated.
As an ignorance in which he and Charlotte had been
personally interested—and to the pitch
of consummately protecting, for years, each other’s
interest—as a condition so imposed upon
her the fact of its having ceased might have made
it, on the spot, the first article of his defence.
He had vouchsafed it, however, nothing better than
his longest stare of postponed consideration.
That tribute he had coldly paid it, and Maggie might
herself have been stupefied, truly, had she not had
something to hold on by, at her own present ability,
even provisional, to make terms with a chapter of
history into which she could but a week before not
have dipped without a mortal chill. At the rate
at which she was living she was getting used hour
by hour to these extensions of view; and when she
asked herself, at Fawns, to what single observation
of her own, in London, the Prince had had an affirmation
to oppose, she but just failed to focus the small
strained wife of the moments in question as some panting
dancer of a difficult step who had capered, before
the footlights of an empty theatre, to a spectator
lounging in a box.
Her best comprehension of Amerigo’s success
in not committing himself was in her recall, meanwhile,
of the inquiries he had made of her on their only
return to the subject, and which he had in fact explicitly
provoked their return in order to make. He had
had it over with her again, the so distinctly remarkable
incident of her interview at home with the little
Bloomsbury shopman. This anecdote, for him, had,
not altogether surprisingly, required some straighter
telling, and the Prince’s attitude in presence
of it had represented once more his nearest approach
to a cross-examination. The difficulty in respect
to the little man had been for the question of his
motive—his motive in writing, first, in
the spirit of retraction, to a lady with whom he had
made a most advantageous bargain, and in then coming
to see her so that his apology should be personal.
Maggie had felt her explanation weak; but there were
the facts, and she could give no other. Left
alone, after the transaction, with the knowledge that
his visitor designed the object bought of him as a
birthday-gift to her father—for Maggie