thout the reflection, by the same stroke, that, whatever this
quantity, he was leaving still more to her own ingenuity. He was helping
her, when the thing came to the test, only by the polished, possibly
almost too polished surface his manner to his wife wore for an admiring
world; and that, surely, was entitled to scarcely more than the praise
of negative diplomacy. He was keeping his manner right, as she had
related to Mrs. Assingham; the case would have been beyond calculation,
truly, if, on top of everything, he had allowed it to go wrong. She had
hours of exaltation indeed when the meaning of all this pressed in upon
her as a tacit vow from him to abide without question by whatever she
should be able to achieve or think fit to prescribe. Then it was that,
even while holding her breath for the awe of it, she truly felt almost
able enough for anything. It was as if she had passed, in a time
incredibly short, from being nothing for him to being all; it was as if,
rightly noted, every turn of his head, every tone of his voice, in these
days, might mean that there was but one way in which a proud man reduced
to abjection could hold himself. During those of Maggie's vigils in
which that view loomed largest, the image of her husband that it thus
presented to her gave out a beauty for the revelation of which she
struck herself as paying, if anything, all too little. To make sure of
it--to make sure of the beauty shining out of the humility, and of the
humility lurking in all the pride of his presence--she would have gone
the length of paying more yet, of paying with difficulties and
anxieties compared to which those actually before her might have been as
superficial as headaches or rainy days.

The point at which these exaltations dropped, however, was the point
at which it was apt to come over her that if her complications had been
greater the question of paying would have been limited still less to
the liabilities of her own pocket. The complications were verily great
enough, whether for ingenuities or sublimities, so long as she had to
come back to it so often that Charlotte, all the while, could only
be struggling with secrets sharper than her own. It was odd how that
certainty again and again determined and coloured her wonderments
of detail; the question, for instance, of HOW Amerigo, in snatched
opportunities of conference, put the haunted creature off with false
explanations, met her particular challenges and evaded