ey had entertained, and
as to the pleasant results of which, down to the cold beef and
bread-and-cheese, the queer old smell and the dirty table-cloth at the
inn, Amerigo was good-humouredly responsive. He had looked at her across
the table, more than once, as if touched by the humility of this
welcome offered to impressions at second-hand, the amusements, the
large freedoms only of others--as if recognising in it something fairly
exquisite; and at the end, while they were alone, before she had rung
for a servant, he had renewed again his condonation of the little
irregularity, such as it was, on which she had ventured. They had risen
together to come upstairs; he had been talking at the last about some of
the people, at the very last of all about Lady Castledean and Mr. Blint;
after which she had once more broken ground on the matter of the "type"
of Gloucester. It brought her, as he came round the table to join her,
yet another of his kind conscious stares, one of the looks, visibly
beguiled, but at the same time not invisibly puzzled, with which he had
already shown his sense of this charming grace of her curiosity. It
was as if he might for a moment be going to say:--"You needn't PRETEND,
dearest, quite so hard, needn't think it necessary to care quite so
much!"--it was as if he stood there before her with some such easy
intelligence, some such intimate reassurance, on his lips. Her answer
would have been all ready--that she wasn't in the least pretending; and
she looked up at him, while he took her hand, with the maintenance, the
real persistence, of her lucid little plan in her eyes. She wanted him
to understand from that very moment that she was going to be WITH him
again, quite with them, together, as she doubtless hadn't been since
the "funny" changes--that was really all one could call them--into
which they had each, as for the sake of the others, too easily and too
obligingly slipped. They had taken too much for granted that their life
together required, as people in London said, a special "form"--which was
very well so long as the form was kept only for the outside world and
was made no more of among themselves than the pretty mould of an iced
pudding, or something of that sort, into which, to help yourself, you
didn't hesitate to break with the spoon. So much as that she would, with
an opening, have allowed herself furthermore to observe; she wanted him
to understand how her scheme embraced Charlotte too; so