ch a case, no
decent substitute for a felt intensity, he had to take it from her that
practically he was afraid--whether afraid to protest falsely enough, or
only afraid of what might be eventually disagreeable in a compromised
alliance, being a minor question. She believed she made out besides,
wonderful girl, that he had never quite expected to have to protest
about anything beyond his natural convenience--more, in fine, than his
disposition and habits, his education as well, his personal _moyens_,
in short, permitted. His predicament was therefore one he couldn't
like, and also one she willingly would have spared him hadn't he
brought it on himself. No man, she was quite aware, could enjoy thus
having it from her that he wasn't good for what she would have called
her reality. It wouldn't have taken much more to enable her positively
to make out in him that he was virtually capable of hinting--had his
innermost feeling spoken--at the propriety rather, in his interest, of
some cutting down, some dressing up, of the offensive real. He would
meet that halfway, but the real must also meet _him_. Milly's sense of
it for herself, which was so conspicuously, so financially supported,
couldn't, or wouldn't, so accommodate him, and the perception of that
fairly showed in his face after a moment like the smart of a blow. It
had marked the one minute during which he could again be touching to
her. By the time he had tried once more, after all, to insist, he had
quite ceased to be so.

By this time she had turned from their window to make a diversion, had
walked him through other rooms, appealing again to the inner charm of
the place, going even so far for that purpose as to point afresh her
independent moral, to repeat that if one only had such a house for
one's own and loved it and cherished it enough, it would pay one back
in kind, would close one in from harm. He quite grasped for the quarter
of an hour the perch she held out to him--grasped it with one hand,
that is, while she felt him attached to his own clue with the other; he
was by no means either so sore or so stupid, to do him all justice, as
not to be able to behave more or less as if nothing had happened. It
was one of his merits, to which she did justice too, that both his
native and his acquired notion of behaviour rested on the general
assumption that nothing--nothing to make a deadly difference for
him--ever _could_ happen. It was, socially, a working view like