flush of
fever, which brought back to her Fanny Assingham's charge, recently
uttered under that roof, of her "thinking" too impenetrably. The word
had remained with her and made her think still more; so that, at first,
as she stood there, she felt responsible for provoking on his part an
irritation of suspense at which she had not aimed. She had been going
about him these three months, she perfectly knew, with a maintained
idea--of which she had never spoken to him; but what had at last
happened was that his way of looking at her, on occasion, seemed a
perception of the presence not of one idea, but of fifty, variously
prepared for uses with which he somehow must reckon. She knew herself
suddenly, almost strangely, glad to be coming to him, at this hour, with
nothing more abstract than a telegram; but even after she had stepped
into his prison under her pretext, while her eyes took in his face
and then embraced the four walls that enclosed his restlessness, she
recognised the virtual identity of his condition with that aspect of
Charlotte's situation for which, early in the summer and in all the
amplitude of a great residence, she had found, with so little seeking,
the similitude of the locked cage. He struck her as caged, the man
who couldn't now without an instant effect on her sensibility give an
instinctive push to the door she had not completely closed behind her.
He had been turning twenty ways, for impatiences all his own, and when
she was once shut in with him it was yet again as if she had come to him
in his more than monastic cell to offer him light or food. There was
a difference none the less, between his captivity and Charlotte's--the
difference, as it might be, of his lurking there by his own act and
his own choice; the admission of which had indeed virtually been in
his starting, on her entrance, as if even this were in its degree an
interference. That was what betrayed for her, practically, his fear of
her fifty ideas, and what had begun, after a minute, to make her wish to
repudiate or explain. It was more wonderful than she could have told;
it was for all the world as if she was succeeding with him beyond her
intention. She had, for these instants, the sense that he exaggerated,
that the imputation of purpose had fairly risen too high in him. She had
begun, a year ago, by asking herself how she could make him think more
of her; but what was it, after all, he was thinking now? He kept his
eyes on her te