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By Root 17347 0

’ – 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 and 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, an abjectly simple person. And she meanwhile, however abjectly simple, was further discerning for herself that, whatever he might have to take from her – she being, on her side, beautifully free – he absolutely wouldn’t be able for any qualifying purpose to name Charlotte either. As his father-in-law’s wife Mrs Verver rose between them there, for the time, in august and prohibitive form; to protect her, defend her, explain about her, was at the least to bring her into the question – which would be by the same stroke to bring her husband. But this was exactly the door Maggie wouldn’t open to him; on all of which she was the next moment asking herself if, thus warned and embarrassed, he weren’t fairly writhing in his pain. He writhed, on that hypothesis, some seconds more, for it wasn’t till then that he had chosen between what he could do and what he couldn’t.

‘You’re apparently drawing immense conclusions from very small matters. Won’t you perhaps feel in fairness that you’re striking out, triumphing, or whatever I may call it, rather too easily – feel it when I perfectly admit that your smashed cup there does come back to me? I frankly confess now to the occasion and to having wished not to speak of it to you at the time. We took two or three hours together by arrangement; it was on the eve of my marriage – at the moment you say. But that put it on the eve of yours too, my dear – which was directly the point. It was desired to find for you, at the eleventh hour, some small wedding-present – a hunt, for something worth giving you, and yet possible from other points of view as well, in which it seemed I could be of use. You were naturally not to be told – precisely because it was all for you. We went forth together and we looked; we rummaged about and, as I remember we called it, we prowled; then it was that, as I freely recognise, we came across that crystal cup – which I’m bound to say, upon my honour, I think it rather a pity Fanny Assingham, from whatever good motive, should have treated so ill.’ He had kept his hands in his pockets; he turned his eyes again, but more complacently now, to the ruins of the precious vessel; and Maggie could feel him exhale into the achieved quietness of his explanation a long deep breath of comparative relief. Behind everything, beneath everything it was somehow a comfort to him at last to be talking with her – and he seemed to be proving to himself that he could talk. ‘It was at a little shop in Bloomsbury – I think I could go to the place now. The man understood Italian, I remember; he wanted awfully to work off his bowl. But I didn’t believe in it and we didn’t take it.’

Maggie had listened with an interest that wore all the expression of candour. ‘Oh you left it for me. But what did you take?’

He looked at her; first as if he were trying to remember, then as if he might have been trying to forget. ‘Nothing, I think – at that place.