you know, they haven’t exactly got.  He should manage to be known—­or at least to be seen—­a little more as his wife’s husband.  You surely must by this time have seen for yourself that he has his own habits and his own ways, and that he makes, more and more—­as of course he has a perfect right to do—­his own discriminations.  He’s so perfect, so ideal a father, and, doubtless largely by that very fact, a generous, a comfortable, an admirable father-in-law, that I should really feel it base to avail myself of any standpoint whatever to criticise him.  To you, nevertheless, I may make just one remark; for you’re not stupid—­you always understand so blessedly what one means.”

He paused an instant, as if even this one remark might be difficult for him should she give no sign of encouraging him to produce it.  Nothing would have induced her, however, to encourage him; she was now conscious of having never in her life stood so still or sat, inwardly, as it were, so tight; she felt like the horse of the adage, brought—­and brought by her own fault—­to the water, but strong, for the occasion, in the one fact that she couldn’t be forced to drink.  Invited, in other words, to understand, she held her breath for fear of showing she did, and this for the excellent reason that she was at last fairly afraid to.  It was sharp for her, at the same time, that she was certain, in advance, of his remark; that she heard it before it had sounded, that she already tasted, in fine, the bitterness it would have for her special sensibility.  But her companion, from an inward and different need of his own, was presently not deterred by her silence.  “What I really don’t see is why, from his own point of view—­given, that is, his conditions, so fortunate as they stood—­he should have wished to marry at all.”  There it was then—­exactly what she knew would come, and exactly, for reasons that seemed now to thump at her heart, as distressing to her.  Yet she was resolved, meanwhile, not to suffer, as they used to say of the martyrs, then and there; not to suffer, odiously, helplessly, in public—­which could be prevented but by her breaking off, with whatever inconsequence; by her treating their discussion as ended and getting away.  She suddenly wanted to go home much as she had wanted, an hour or two before, to come.  She wanted to leave well behind her both her question and the couple in whom it had, abruptly, taken such vivid form—­but it was dreadful to have the appearance of disconcerted flight.  Discussion had of itself, to her sense, become danger—­such light, as from open crevices, it let in; and the overt recognition of danger was worse than anything else.  The worst in fact came while she was thinking how she could retreat and still not overtly recognise.  Her face had betrayed her trouble, and with that she was lost.  “I’m afraid, however,” the Prince said, “that I, for some reason, distress you—­for which I beg your pardon.  We’ve always talked so well together—­it has been,