as that her inner
sense, in spite of everything, represented him as still pulling wires
and controlling currents, or rather indeed as muffling the whole
possibility, keeping it down and down, leading his accomplice
continually on to some new turn of the road. As regards herself Maggie
had become more conscious from week to week of his ingenuities of
intention to make up to her for their forfeiture, in so dire a degree,
of any reality of frankness--a privation that had left on his lips
perhaps a little of the same thirst with which she fairly felt her own
distorted, the torment of the lost pilgrim who listens in desert sands
for the possible, the impossible, plash of water. It was just this
hampered state in him, none the less, that she kept before her when she
wished most to find grounds of dignity for the hard little passion
which nothing he had done could smother. There were hours enough,
lonely hours, in which she let dignity go; then there were others when,
clinging with her winged concentration to some deep cell of her heart,
she stored away her hived tenderness as if she had gathered it all from
flowers. He was walking ostensibly beside her, but in fact given over,
without a break, to the grey medium in which he helplessly groped; a
perception on her part which was a perpetual pang and which might last
what it would--for ever if need be--but which, if relieved at all, must
be relieved by his act alone. She herself could do nothing more for it;
she had done the utmost possible. It was meantime not the easier to bear
for this aspect under which Charlotte was presented as depending on him
for guidance, taking it from him even in doses of bitterness, and yet
lost with him in devious depths. Nothing was thus more sharply to be
inferred than that he had promptly enough warned her, on hearing from
her of the precious assurance received from his wife, that she must take
care her satisfaction didn't betray something of her danger. Maggie
had a day of still waiting, after allowing him time to learn how
unreservedly she had lied for him--of waiting as for the light of she
scarce knew what slow-shining reflection of this knowledge in his
personal attitude. What retarded evolution, she asked herself in these
hours, mightn't poor Charlotte all unwittingly have precipitated? She
was thus poor Charlotte again for Maggie even while Maggie's own head
was bowed, and the reason for this kept coming back to our young woman
in the conce