from week to week, had fairly received, with the
procession of the weeks, the consecration of time; but it scarce needed
to be insisted on that she was seeing him on HIS terms, not all on
hers, or that, in other words, she must allow him his unexplained and
uncharted, his one practicably workable way. If that way, by one of the
intimate felicities the liability to which was so far from having even
yet completely fallen from him, happened handsomely to show him as more
bored than boring (with advantages of his own freely to surrender, but
none to be persuadedly indebted to others for,) what did such a false
face of the matter represent but the fact itself that she was pledged?
If she had questioned or challenged or interfered--if she had reserved
herself that right--she wouldn't have been pledged; whereas there were
still, and evidently would be yet a while, long, tense stretches
during which their case might have been hanging, for every eye, on her
possible, her impossible defection. She must keep it up to the last,
mustn't absent herself for three minutes from her post: only on those
lines, assuredly, would she show herself as with him and not against
him.

It was extraordinary how scant a series of signs she had invited him to
make of being, of truly having been at any time, "with" his wife: that
reflection she was not exempt from as they now, in their suspense,
supremely waited--a reflection under the brush of which she recognised
her having had, in respect to him as well, to "do all," to go the whole
way over, to move, indefatigably, while he stood as fixed in his place
as some statue of one of his forefathers. The meaning of it would seem
to be, she reasoned in sequestered hours, that he HAD a place, and that
this was an attribute somehow indefeasible, unquenchable, which laid
upon others--from the moment they definitely wanted anything of him--
the necessity of taking more of the steps that he could, of circling
round him, of remembering for his benefit the famous relation of the
mountain to Mahomet. It was strange, if one had gone into it, but such
a place as Amerigo's was like something made for him beforehand by
innumerable facts, facts largely of the sort known as historical, made
by ancestors, examples, traditions, habits; while Maggie's own had come
to show simply as that improvised "post"--a post of the kind spoken of
as advanced--with which she was to have found herself connected in the
fashion of a settl