y the thing. "In that case he will leave you
Charlotte to take care of in our absence. You'll have to carry her off
somewhere for your last evening; unless you may prefer to spend it with
her here. I shall then see that you dine, that you have everything,
quite beautifully. You'll be able to do as you like."

She couldn't have been sure beforehand, and had really not been; but
the most immediate result of this speech was his letting her see that
he took it for no cheap extravagance either of irony or of oblivion.
Nothing in the world, of a truth, had ever been so sweet to her, as his
look of trying to be serious enough to make no mistake about it. She
troubled him--which hadn't been at all her purpose; she mystified
him--which she couldn't help and, comparatively, didn't mind; then it
came over her that he had, after all, a simplicity, very considerable,
on which she had never dared to presume. It was a discovery--not like
the other discovery she had once made, but giving out a freshness; and
she recognised again in the light of it the number of the ideas of which
he thought her capable. They were all, apparently, queer for him, but
she had at least, with the lapse of the months, created the perception
that there might be something in them; whereby he stared there,
beautiful and sombre, at what she was at present providing him with.
There was something of his own in his mind, to which, she was sure, he
referred everything for a measure and a meaning; he had never let go
of it, from the evening, weeks before, when, in her room, after his
encounter with the Bloomsbury cup, she had planted it there by flinging
it at him, on the question of her father's view of him, her determined
"Find out for yourself!" She had been aware, during the months, that he
had been trying to find out, and had been seeking, above all, to avoid
the appearance of any evasions of such a form of knowledge as might
reach him, with violence or with a penetration more insidious, from any
other source. Nothing, however, had reached him; nothing he could at
all conveniently reckon with had disengaged itself for him even from
the announcement, sufficiently sudden, of the final secession of their
companions. Charlotte was in pain, Charlotte was in torment, but he
himself had given her reason enough for that; and, in respect to the
rest of the whole matter of her obligation to follow her husband, that
personage and she, Maggie, had so shuffled away every link