was her one purely good fortune that she could feel thus sure impertinence – to her at any rate – was not among the arts on which he proposed to throw himself; for though he had in so almost mystifying a manner, replied to nothing, denied nothing, explained nothing, apologised for nothing, he had somehow conveyed to her that this was not because of any determination to treat 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 truly herself have been stupefied, hadn’t she 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, of those offered him 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 had capered, before the footlights of an empty theatre, to a spectator lounging in a box.
Her best comprehension of Amerigo’s success in not committing himself was in her recall meanwhile of the enquiries he had made of her on their only return to the subject, and which he had in fact explicitly provoked their return in order to make. He had had it over with her again, the so distinctly remarkable incident of her interview at home with the little Bloomsbury shopman. This anecdote, for him, had, not altogether surprisingly, required some straighter telling, and the Prince’s attitude in presence of it had represented once more his nearest approach to a cross-examination. The difficulty in respect to the little man had been for the question of his motive – his motive in writing first, in the spirit of retractation, to a lady with whom he had made a most advantageous bargain, and in then coming to see her so that his apology should be personal. Maggie had felt her explanation weak, but there were the facts, and she could give no other. Left alone after the transaction with the knowledge that his visitor designed the object bought of him as a birthday-gift to her father – for Maggie confessed freely to having chattered to him almost