being
kept without money; it wouldn't have taken much to make her think of
him as really kept without food. He might have broken away, might easily
have started to travel; he had a right--thought wonderful Maggie now--to
so many more freedoms than he took! His secret was of course that at
Fawns he all the while winced, was all the while in presences in respect
to which he had thrown himself back, with a hard pressure, on whatever
mysteries of pride, whatever inward springs familiar to the man of the
world, he could keep from snapping. Maggie, for some reason, had that
morning, while she watched the sunrise, taken an extraordinary measure
of the ground on which he would have HAD to snatch at pretexts for
absence. It all came to her there--he got off to escape from a sound.
The sound was in her own ears still--that of Charlotte's high coerced
quaver before the cabinets in the hushed gallery; the voice by which
she herself had been pierced the day before as by that of a creature in
anguish and by which, while she sought refuge at the blurred window, the
tears had been forced into her eyes. Her comprehension soared so high
that the wonder for her became really his not feeling the need of wider
intervals and thicker walls. Before THAT admiration she also meditated;
consider as she might now, she kept reading not less into what he
omitted than into what he performed a beauty of intention that touched
her fairly the more by being obscure. It was like hanging over a garden
in the dark; nothing was to be made of the confusion of growing things,
but one felt they were folded flowers, and their vague sweetness made
the whole air their medium. He had to turn away, but he wasn't at least
a coward; he would wait on the spot for the issue of what he had done
on the spot. She sank to her knees with her arm on the ledge of her
window-seat, where she blinded her eyes from the full glare of seeing
that his idea could only be to wait, whatever might come, at her side.
It was to her buried face that she thus, for a long time, felt him draw
nearest; though after a while, when the strange wail of the gallery
began to repeat its inevitable echo, she was conscious of how that
brought out his pale hard grimace.

XXXIX

The resemblance had not been present to her on first coming out into the
hot, still brightness of the Sunday afternoon--only the second Sunday,
of all the summer, when the party of six, the party of