open to her
to retort to his possible "What are your reasons, my dear?" by a
lucidly-produced "What are hers, love, please?--isn't that what we had
better know? Mayn't her reasons be a dislike, beautifully founded, of
the presence, and thereby of the observation, of persons who perhaps
know about her things it's inconvenient to her they should know?" That
hideous card she might in mere logic play--being by this time, at her
still swifter private pace, intimately familiar with all the fingered
pasteboard in her pack. But she could play it only on the forbidden
issue of sacrificing him; the issue so forbidden that it involved even
a horror of finding out if he would really have consented to be
sacrificed. What she must do she must do by keeping her hands off him;
and nothing meanwhile, as we see, had less in common with that scruple
than such a merciless manipulation of their yielding beneficiaries as
her spirit so boldly revelled in. She saw herself, in this connexion,
without detachment--saw others alone with intensity; otherwise she might
have been struck, fairly have been amused, by her free assignment of
the pachydermatous quality. If SHE could face the awkwardness of the
persistence of her friends at Fawns in spite of Charlotte, she somehow
looked to them for an inspiration of courage that would improve upon her
own. They were in short not only themselves to find a plausibility and
an audacity, but were somehow by the way to pick up these forms for her,
Maggie, as well. And she felt indeed that she was giving them scant
time longer when, one afternoon in Portland Place, she broke out with an
irrelevance that was merely superficial.

"What awfulness, in heaven's name, is there between them? What do you
believe, what do you KNOW?"

Oh, if she went by faces her visitor's sudden whiteness, at this, might
have carried her far! Fanny Assingham turned pale for it, but there was
something in such an appearance, in the look it put into the eyes, that
renewed Maggie's conviction of what this companion had been expecting.
She had been watching it come, come from afar, and now that it was
there, after all, and the first convulsion over, they would doubtless
soon find themselves in a more real relation. It was there because of
the Sunday luncheon they had partaken of alone together; it was there,
as strangely as one would, because of the bad weather, the cold perverse
June rain, that was making the day wrong; it was there becau