It was just the delicacy, however, that in Paris—­which, suggestively, was Brighton at a hundredfold higher pitch—­made, between him and his companion, the tension, made the suspense, made what he would have consented perhaps to call the provisional peculiarity, of present conditions.  These elements acted in a manner of their own, imposing and involving, under one head, many abstentions and precautions, twenty anxieties and reminders—­ things, verily, he would scarce have known how to express; and yet creating for them at every step an acceptance of their reality.  He was hanging back, with Charlotte, till another person should intervene for their assistance, and yet they had, by what had already occurred, been carried on to something it was out of the power of other persons to make either less or greater.  Common conventions—­that was what was odd—­had to be on this basis more thought of; those common conventions that, previous to the passage by the Brighton strand, he had so enjoyed the sense of their overlooking.  The explanation would have been, he supposed—­ or would have figured it with less of unrest—­that Paris had, in its way, deeper voices and warnings, so that if you went at all “far” there it laid bristling traps, as they might have been viewed, all smothered in flowers, for your going further still.  There were strange appearances in the air, and before you knew it you might be unmistakably matching them.  Since he wished therefore to match no appearance but that of a gentleman playing with perfect fairness any game in life he might be called to, he found himself, on the receipt of Maggie’s missive, rejoicing with a certain inconsistency.  The announcement made her from home had, in the act, cost some biting of his pen to sundry parts of him—­ his personal modesty, his imagination of her prepared state for so quick a jump, it didn’t much matter which—­and yet he was more eager than not for the drop of delay and for the quicker transitions promised by the arrival of the imminent pair.  There was after all a hint of offence to a man of his age in being taken, as they said at the shops, on approval.  Maggie, certainly, would have been as far as Charlotte herself from positively desiring this, and Charlotte, on her side, as far as Maggie from holding him light as a real value.  She made him fidget thus, poor girl, but from generous rigour of conscience.

These allowances of his spirit were, all the same, consistent with a great gladness at the sight of the term of his ordeal; for it was the end of his seeming to agree that questions and doubts had a place.  The more he had inwardly turned the matter over the more it had struck him that they had in truth only an ugliness.  What he could have best borne, as he now believed, would have been Charlotte’s simply saying to him that she didn’t like him enough.  This he wouldn’t have enjoyed, but he would quite have understood it and been able ruefully to submit.  She did like him enough—­nothing