n their
different ways, equally trying to save. And they were saving it--yes,
they were, or at least she was: that was still the workable issue, she
could say, as she felt her dizziness drop. She held herself hard; the
thing was to be done, once for all, by her acting, now, where she stood.
So much was crowded into so short a space that she knew already she
was keeping her head. She had kept it by the warning of his eyes; she
shouldn't lose it again; she knew how and why, and if she had turned
cold this was precisely what helped her. He had said to himself "She'll
break down and name Amerigo; she'll say it's to him she's sacrificing
me; and its by what that will give me--with so many other things
too--that my suspicion will be clinched." He was watching her lips,
spying for the symptoms of the sound; whereby these symptoms had only to
fail and he would have got nothing that she didn't measure out to him
as she gave it. She had presently in fact so recovered herself that she
seemed to know she could more easily have made him name his wife than
he have made her name her husband. It was there before her that if
she should so much as force him just NOT consciously to avoid saying
"Charlotte, Charlotte" he would have given himself away. But to be sure
of this was enough for her, and she saw more clearly with each lapsing
instant what they were both doing. He was doing what he had steadily
been coming to; he was practically OFFERING himself, pressing himself
upon her, as a sacrifice--he had read his way so into her best
possibility; and where had she already, for weeks and days past, planted
her feet if not on her acceptance of the offer? Cold indeed, colder and
colder she turned, as she felt herself suffer this close personal
vision of his attitude still not to make her weaken. That was her very
certitude, the intensity of his pressure; for if something dreadful
hadn't happened there wouldn't, for either of them, be these dreadful
things to do. She had meanwhile, as well, the immense advantage that
she could have named Charlotte without exposing herself--as, for that
matter, she was the next minute showing him.

"Why, I sacrifice you, simply, to everything and to every one. I take
the consequences of your marriage as perfectly natural."

He threw back his head a little, settling with one hand his eyeglass.
"What do you call, my dear, the consequences?"

"Your life as your marriage has made it."

"Well, hasn't it made it