appropriation of it, and after laying them carefully down went back for what remained, the solid detached foot. With this she returned to the mantel-shelf, placing it with deliberation in the centre and then for a minute occupying herself as with the attempt to fit the other morsels together. The split determined by the latent crack was so sharp and so neat that if there had been anything to hold them the bowl might still quite beautifully, a few steps away, have passed for uninjured. As there was however nothing to hold them but Maggie’s hands during the few moments the latter were so employed, she could only lay the almost equal parts of the vessel carefully beside their pedestal and leave them thus before her husband’s eyes. She had proceeded without words, but quite as if with a sought effect – in spite of which it had all seemed to her to take a far longer time than anything she had ever so quickly accomplished. Amerigo said nothing either – though it was true his silence had the gloss of the warning she doubtless appeared to admonish him to take: it was as if her manner hushed him to the proper observation of what she was doing. He should have no doubt of it whatever: she knew, and her broken bowl was proof that she knew – yet the least part of her desire was to make him waste words. He would have to think – this she knew even better still; and all she was for the present concerned with was that he should be aware. She had taken him for aware all day, or at least for obscurely and instinctively anxious – as to that she had just committed herself to Fanny Assingham; but what she had been wrong about was the effect of his anxiety. His fear of staying away, as a marked symptom, had at least proved greater than his fear of coming in; he had come in even at the risk of bringing it with him – and ah what more did she require now than her sense, established within the first minute or two, that he had brought it, however he might be steadying himself against dangers of betrayal by some wrong word, and that it was shut in there between them, the successive moments throbbing under it the while as the pulse of fever throbs under the doctor’s thumb?
Maggie’s sense accordingly in his presence was that though the bowl had been broken her reason hadn’t; the reason for which she had made up her mind, the reason for which she had summoned her friend, the reason for which she had addressed the place to her husband’s eyes; it was all one reason, and as her intense little clutch held the matter what had happened by Fanny’s act and by his apprehension of it hadn’t in the least happened to her, but absolutely and directly to himself, as he must proceed to take in. There it was that her wish for time interposed – time for Amerigo’s use, not for hers, since she for ever so long now, for hours and hours as they seemed, had been living with eternity; with which she would continue to live. She wanted to say to him ‘Take it, take it, take all you need of it; arrange yourself so as to suffer least, or to be at any rate least distorted and disfigured. Only see, see that I see, and make up your mind on this new basis at your convenience. Wait – it won’t be long – till you can confer again with Charlotte, for you’ll do it much better then, more easily to both of us. Above all don’t show me, till you’ve got it well under, the dreadful blur, the ravage of suspense and embarrassment produced, and produced by my doing, in your personal serenity, your incomparable superiority.’ After she had squared again her little objects on the chimney she was within an ace, in fact, of turning on him with that appeal; besides its being lucid for her all the while that the occasion was passing, that they were dining out, that he wasn’t dressed, and that, though she herself was, she was yet in all probability so horribly red in the face and so awry in many ways with agitation, that in view of the Ambassador’s company, of possible comments and constructions, she should need before her glass some restoration of appearances.
Amerigo meanwhile after all could clearly