o. She defends you," Maggie
remarked.

He had given her all his attention, and with this impression for
her, again, that he was, in essence, fairly reaching out to her for
time--time, only time--she could sufficiently imagine, and to whatever
strangeness, that he absolutely liked her to talk, even at the cost of
his losing almost everything else by it. It was still, for a minute, as
if he waited for something worse; wanted everything that was in her to
come out, any definite fact, anything more precisely nameable, so that
he too--as was his right--should know where he was. What stirred in him
above all, while he followed in her face the clear train of her speech,
must have been the impulse to take up something she put before him that
he was yet afraid directly to touch. He wanted to make free with it, but
had to keep his hands off--for reasons he had already made out; and
the discomfort of his privation yearned at her out of his eyes with an
announcing gleam of the fever, the none too tolerable chill, of specific
recognition. She affected him as speaking more or less for her father as
well, and his eyes might have been trying to hypnotise her into giving
him the answer without his asking the question. "Had HE his idea, and
has he now, with you, anything more?"--those were the words he had to
hold himself from not speaking and that she would as yet, certainly,
do nothing to make easy. She felt with her sharpest thrill how he was
straitened and tied, and with the miserable pity of it her present
conscious purpose of keeping him so could none the less perfectly
accord. To name her father, on any such basis of anxiety, of
compunction, would be to do the impossible thing, to do neither more nor
less than give Charlotte away. Visibly, palpably, traceably, he stood
off from this, moved back from it as from an open chasm now suddenly
perceived, but which had been, between the two, with so much, so
strangely much else, quite uncalculated. Verily it towered before
her, this history of their confidence. They had built strong and piled
high--based as it was on such appearances--their conviction that, thanks
to her native complacencies of so many sorts, she would always, quite to
the end and through and through, take them as nobly sparing her. Amerigo
was at any rate having the sensation of a particular ugliness to avoid,
a particular difficulty to count with, that practically found him as
unprepared as if he had been, like his wife