them together and laid them
down; then she made up her mind. "I've failed!" she sounded out before
Charlotte, having given her time, walked away. She watched her, splendid
and erect, float down the long vista; then she sank upon a seat. Yes,
she had done all.

PART SIXTH.

XL

"I'll do anything you like," she said to her husband on one of the last
days of the month, "if our being here, this way at this time, seems to
you too absurd, or too uncomfortable, or too impossible. We'll either
take leave of them now, without waiting--or we'll come back in time,
three days before they start. I'll go abroad with you, if you but say
the word; to Switzerland, the Tyrol, the Italian Alps, to whichever of
your old high places you would like most to see again--those beautiful
ones that used to do you good after Rome and that you so often told me
about."

Where they were, in the conditions that prompted this offer, and where
it might indeed appear ridiculous that, with the stale London September
close at hand, they should content themselves with remaining, was where
the desert of Portland Place looked blank as it had never looked, and
where a drowsy cabman, scanning the horizon for a fare, could sink to
oblivion of the risks of immobility. But Amerigo was of the odd opinion,
day after day, that their situation couldn't be bettered; and he even
went at no moment through the form of replying that, should their ordeal
strike her as exceeding their patience, any step they might take would
be for her own relief. This was, no doubt, partly because he stood out
so wonderfully, to the end, against admitting, by a weak word at least,
that any element of their existence WAS, or ever had been, an ordeal; no
trap of circumstance, no lapse of "form," no accident of irritation, had
landed him in that inconsequence. His wife might verily have suggested
that he was consequent--consequent with the admirable appearance he had
from the first so undertaken, and so continued, to present--rather too
rigidly at HER expense; only, as it happened, she was not the little
person to do anything of the sort, and the strange tacit compact
actually in operation between them might have been founded on an
intelligent comparison, a definite collation positively, of the kinds of
patience proper to each. She was seeing him through--he had engaged
to come out at the right end if she WOULD see him: this understanding,
tacitly renewed