ilence the truth about his good
nature and his good manners; and it was this demonstration of his
virtue, precisely, that added to the strangeness, even for herself, of
her failing as yet to yield to him. It would be a question but of
the most trivial act of surrender, the vibration of a nerve, the mere
movement of a muscle; but the act grew important between them just
through her doing perceptibly nothing, nothing but talk in the very tone
that would naturally have swept her into tenderness. She knew more
and more--every lapsing minute taught her--how he might by a single
rightness make her cease to watch him; that rightness, a million miles
removed from the queer actual, falling so short, which would consist
of his breaking out to her diviningly, indulgently, with the last happy
inconsequence. "Come away with me, somewhere, YOU--and then we needn't
think, we needn't even talk, of anything, of anyone else:" five words
like that would answer her, would break her utterly down. But they were
the only ones that would so serve. She waited for them, and there was
a supreme instant when, by the testimony of all the rest of him, she
seemed to feel them in his heart and on his lips; only they didn't
sound, and as that made her wait again so it made her more intensely
watch. This in turn showed her that he too watched and waited, and how
much he had expected something that he now felt wouldn't come. Yes, it
wouldn't come if he didn't answer her, if he but said the wrong things
instead of the right. If he could say the right everything would
come--it hung by a hair that everything might crystallise for their
recovered happiness at his touch. This possibility glowed at her,
however, for fifty seconds, only then to turn cold, and as it fell away
from her she felt the chill of reality and knew again, all but pressed
to his heart and with his breath upon her cheek, the slim rigour of her
attitude, a rigour beyond that of her natural being. They had silences,
at last, that were almost crudities of mutual resistance--silences that
persisted through his felt effort to treat her recurrence to the part he
had lately played, to interpret all the sweetness of her so talking
to him, as a manner of making love to him. Ah, it was no such manner,
heaven knew, for Maggie; she could make love, if this had been in
question, better than that! On top of which it came to her presently
to say, keeping in with what she had already spoken: "Except of cour