he might easily have made an
abject fool of her--at least for the time. She had indeed, for just ten
seconds, been afraid of some such turn: the uncertainty in his face had
become so, the next thing, an uncertainty in the very air. Three words
of impatience the least bit loud, some outbreak of "What in the world
are you 'up to', and what do you mean?" any note of that sort would
instantly have brought her low--and this all the more that heaven knew
she hadn't in any manner designed to be high. It was such a trifle, her
small breach with custom, or at any rate with his natural presumption,
that all magnitude of wonder had already had, before one could deprecate
the shadow of it, the effect of a complication. It had made for him some
difference that she couldn't measure, this meeting him at home and alone
instead of elsewhere and with others, and back and back it kept coming
to her that the blankness he showed her before he was able to SEE might,
should she choose to insist on it, have a meaning--have, as who should
say, an historic value--beyond the importance of momentary expressions
in general. She had naturally had on the spot no ready notion of what he
might want to see; it was enough for a ready notion, not to speak of
a beating heart, that he DID see, that he saw his wife in her own
drawing-room at the hour when she would most properly be there. He
hadn't in any way challenged her, it was true, and, after those instants
during which she now believed him to have been harbouring the impression
of something unusually prepared and pointed in her attitude and
array, he had advanced upon her smiling and smiling, and thus, without
hesitation at the last, had taken her into his arms. The hesitation
had been at the first, and she at present saw that he had surmounted it
without her help. She had given him no help; for if, on the one hand,
she couldn't speak for hesitation, so on the other--and especially as he
didn't ask her--she couldn't explain why she was agitated. She had known
it all the while down to her toes, known it in his presence with fresh
intensity, and if he had uttered but a question it would have pressed
in her the spring of recklessness. It had been strange that the most
natural thing of all to say to him should have had that appearance; but
she was more than ever conscious that any appearance she had would
come round, more or less straight, to her father, whose life was now
so quiet, on the basis accepted f