reat her case as not "worth" it. There
had been consideration, on both occasions, in the way he had listened
to her--even though at the same time there had been extreme reserve;
a reserve indeed, it was also to be remembered, qualified by the fact
that, on their second and shorter interview, in Portland Place, and
quite at the end of this passage, she had imagined him positively
proposing to her a temporary accommodation. It had been but the matter
of something in the depths of the eyes he finally fixed upon her,
and she had found in it, the more she kept it before her, the
tacitly-offered sketch of a working arrangement. "Leave me my reserve;
don't question it--it's all I have, just now, don't you see? so that, if
you'll make me the concession of letting me alone with it for as long a
time as I require, I promise you something or other, grown under cover
of it, even though I don't yet quite make out what, as a return for your
patience." She had turned away from him with some such unspoken words as
that in her ear, and indeed she had to represent to herself that she had
spiritually heard them, had to listen to them still again, to explain
her particular patience in face of his particular failure. He hadn't so
much as pretended to meet for an instant the question raised by her of
her accepted ignorance of the point in time, the period before their own
marriage, from which his intimacy with Charlotte dated. As an ignorance
in which he and Charlotte had been personally interested--and to the
pitch of consummately protecting, for years, each other's interest--as
a condition so imposed upon her the fact of its having ceased might
have made it, on the spot, the first article of his defence. He had
vouchsafed it, however, nothing better than his longest stare of
postponed consideration. That tribute he had coldly paid it, and Maggie
might herself have been stupefied, truly, had she not had something to
hold on by, at her own present ability, even provisional, to make terms
with a chapter of history into which she could but a week before not
have dipped without a mortal chill. At the rate at which she was living
she was getting used hour by hour to these extensions of view; and when
she asked herself, at Fawns, to what single observation of her own, in
London, the Prince had had an affirmation to oppose, she but just failed
to focus the small strained wife of the moments in question as
some panting dancer of a difficult step who