ocked her hat under the inspiration of this
opportunity to hint how a couple of spirited young men, reacting from
confinement and sallying forth arm-in-arm, might encounter the agreeable
in forms that would strike them for the time at least as novel. She had
felt for fifty seconds, with her eyes, all so sweetly and falsely, in
her companion's, horribly vulgar; yet without minding it either--such
luck should she have if to be nothing worse than vulgar would see her
through. "And I thought Amerigo might like it better," she had said,
"than wandering off alone."

"Do you mean that he won't go unless I take him?"

She had considered here, and never in her life had she considered so
promptly and so intently. If she really put it that way, her husband,
challenged, might belie the statement; so that what would that do but
make her father wonder, make him perhaps ask straight out, why she was
exerting pressure? She couldn't of course afford to be suspected for an
instant of exerting pressure; which was why she was obliged only to make
answer: "Wouldn't that be just what you must have out with HIM?"

"Decidedly--if he makes me the proposal. But he hasn't made it yet."

Oh, once more, how she was to feel she had smirked! "Perhaps he's too
shy!"

"Because you're so sure he so really wants my company?"

"I think he has thought you might like it."

"Well, I should--!" But with this he looked away from her, and she
held her breath to hear him either ask if she wished him to address
the question to Amerigo straight, or inquire if she should be greatly
disappointed by his letting it drop. What had "settled" her, as she was
privately to call it, was that he had done neither of these things, and
had thereby markedly stood off from the risk involved in trying to draw
out her reason. To attenuate, on the other hand, this appearance, and
quite as if to fill out the too large receptacle made, so musingly,
by his abstention, he had himself presently given her a reason--had
positively spared her the effort of asking whether he judged Charlotte
not to have approved. He had taken everything on himself--THAT was what
had settled her. She had had to wait very little more to feel, with
this, how much he was taking. The point he made was his lack of any
eagerness to put time and space, on any such scale, between himself and
his wife. He wasn't so unhappy with her--far from it, and Maggie was to
hold that he had grinned back, paternally, throu