ve her to think of. There was, honestly, an awful mixture in
things, and it was not closed to her aftersense of such passages--we
have already indeed, in other cases, seen it open--that the deepest
depth of all, in a perceived penalty, was that you couldn't be sure
some of your compunctions and contortions wouldn't show for ridiculous.
Amerigo, that morning, for instance, had been as absent as he at this
juncture appeared to desire he should mainly be noted as being; he
had gone to London for the day and the night--a necessity that now
frequently rose for him and that he had more than once suffered to
operate during the presence of guests, successions of pretty women, the
theory of his fond interest in whom had been publicly cultivated. It had
never occurred to his wife to pronounce him ingenuous, but there came at
last a high dim August dawn when she couldn't sleep and when, creeping
restlessly about and breathing at her window the coolness of wooded
acres, she found the faint flush of the east march with the perception
of that other almost equal prodigy. It rosily coloured her vision
that--even such as he was, yes--her husband could on occasion sin by
excess of candour. He wouldn't otherwise have given as his reason for
going up to Portland Place in the August days that he was arranging
books there. He had bought a great many of late, and he had had others,
a large number, sent from Rome--wonders of old print in which her father
had been interested. But when her imagination tracked him to the
dusty town, to the house where drawn blinds and pale shrouds, where a
caretaker and a kitchenmaid were alone in possession, it wasn't to see
him, in his shirtsleeves, unpacking battered boxes.

She saw him, in truth, less easily beguiled--saw him wander, in the
closed dusky rooms, from place to place, or else, for long periods,
recline on deep sofas and stare before him through the smoke of
ceaseless cigarettes. She made him out as liking better than anything
in the world just now to be alone with his thoughts. Being herself
connected with his thoughts, she continued to believe, more than she had
ever been, it was thereby a good deal as if he were alone with HER. She
made him out as resting so from that constant strain of the perfunctory
to which he was exposed at Fawns; and she was accessible to the
impression of the almost beggared aspect of this alternative. It was
like his doing penance in sordid ways--being sent to prison or