in their actual order, that she mustn't be further worried
until Maggie should have put her at her ease.

It was just the delicacy, however, that in Paris--which, suggestively,
was Brighton at a hundredfold higher pitch--made, between him and his
companion, the tension, made the suspense, made what he would have
consented perhaps to call the provisional peculiarity, of present
conditions. These elements acted in a manner of their own, imposing
and involving, under one head, many abstentions and precautions, twenty
anxieties and reminders--things, verily, he would scarce have known
how to express; and yet creating for them at every step an acceptance of
their reality. He was hanging back, with Charlotte, till another person
should intervene for their assistance, and yet they had, by what had
already occurred, been carried on to something it was out of the
power of other persons to make either less or greater. Common
conventions--that was what was odd--had to be on this basis more thought
of; those common conventions that, previous to the passage by the
Brighton strand, he had so enjoyed the sense of their overlooking. The
explanation would have been, he supposed--or would have figured it with
less of unrest--that Paris had, in its way, deeper voices and warnings,
so that if you went at all "far" there it laid bristling traps, as they
might have been viewed, all smothered in flowers, for your going further
still. There were strange appearances in the air, and before you knew
it you might be unmistakably matching them. Since he wished therefore
to match no appearance but that of a gentleman playing with perfect
fairness any game in life he might be called to, he found himself, on
the receipt of Maggie's missive, rejoicing with a certain inconsistency.
The announcement made her from home had, in the act, cost some biting of
his pen to sundry parts of him--his personal modesty, his imagination
of her prepared state for so quick a jump, it didn't much matter
which--and yet he was more eager than not for the drop of delay and for
the quicker transitions promised by the arrival of the imminent pair.
There was after all a hint of offence to a man of his age in being
taken, as they said at the shops, on approval. Maggie, certainly, would
have been as far as Charlotte herself from positively desiring this,
and Charlotte, on her side, as far as Maggie from holding him light as
a real value. She made him fidget thus, poor girl, but