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By Root 7098 0

anything better.’ She went on explaining as for the pleasure of explaining – even though knowing he must recognise, as a part of his easy way too, her description of his large liberality. ‘Your taking the child down yourself, those days, and your coming each time to bring him away – nothing in the world, nothing you could have invented, would have kept father more under the charm. Besides, you know how you’ve always suited him and how you’ve always so beautifully let it seem to him that he suits you. Only it has been these last weeks as if you wished – just in order to please him – to remind him of it afresh. So there it is,’ she wound up; ‘it’s your doing. You’ve produced your effect – that of his wanting not to be, even for a month or two, where you’re not. He doesn’t want to bother or bore you – that, I think, you know, he never has done; and if you’ll only give me time I’ll come round again to making it my care, as always, that he shan’t. But he can’t bear you out of his sight.’

She had kept it up and up, filling it out, crowding it in; and all really without difficulty, for it was, every word of it, thanks to a long evolution of feeling, what she had been primed to the brim with. She made the picture, forced it upon him, hung it before him; remembering happily how he had gone so far, one day, supported by the Principino, as to propose the Zoo in Eaton Square, to carry with him there, on the spot, under this pleasant inspiration, both his elder and his younger companion, with the latter of whom he had taken the tone that they were introducing Grand-daddy, Grand-daddy nervous and rather funking it, to lions and tigers more or less at large. Touch by touch she thus dropped into her husband’s silence the truth about his good nature and his good manners; and it was this demonstration of his virtue precisely that added to the strangeness, even for herself, of her failing as yet to yield to him. It would be a question but of the most trivial act of surrender, the vibration of a nerve, the mere movement of a muscle; but the act grew important between them just through her doing perceptibly nothing, nothing but talk in the very tone that would naturally have swept her into tenderness. She knew more and more – every lapsing minute taught her – how he might by a single rightness make her cease to watch him; that rightness, a million miles removed from the queer actual, falling so short, which would consist of his breaking out to her diviningly, indulgently, with the last happy inconsequence. ‘Come away with me somewhere, you – and then we needn’t think, we needn’t even talk, of anything, of any one else’: five words like that would answer her, would break her utterly down. But they were the only ones that would so serve. She waited for them, and there was a supreme instant when by the testimony of all the rest of him she seemed to feel them in his heart and on his lips; only they didn’t sound, and as that made her wait again so it made her more intensely watch. This in turn showed her that he too watched and waited, and how much he had expected something that he now felt wouldn’t come. Yes, it wouldn’t come if he didn’t answer her, if he but said the wrong things instead of the right. If he could say the right everything would come – it hung by a hair that everything might crystallise for their recovered happiness at his touch. This possibility glowed at her however for fifty seconds only then to turn cold, and as it fell away from her she felt the chill of reality and knew again, all but pressed to his heart and with his breath upon her cheek, the slim rigour of her attitude, a rigour beyond that of her natural being. They at last had silences that were almost crudities of mutual resistance – silences that persisted through his felt effort to treat her recurrence to the part he had lately played, to interpret all the sweetness of her so talking to him, as a manner of making love to him. Ah it was no such manner, heaven knew, for Maggie; she could make love, if this had been in question, better than that! On top of which it came