Assingham
had really something for him that she was keeping back; in spite of
his full consciousness, overflowing the cup like a wine too generously
poured, that if he had consented to marry his daughter, and thereby to
make, as it were, the difference, what surrounded him now was, exactly,
consent vivified, marriage demonstrated, the difference, in fine,
definitely made. He could call back his prior, his own wedded
consciousness--it was not yet out of range of vague reflection. He had
supposed himself, above all he had supposed his wife, as married as
anyone could be, and yet he wondered if their state had deserved the
name, or their union worn the beauty, in the degree to which the couple
now before him carried the matter. In especial since the birth of their
boy, in New York--the grand climax of their recent American period,
brought to so right an issue--the happy pair struck him as having
carried it higher, deeper, further; to where it ceased to concern
his imagination, at any rate, to follow them. Extraordinary, beyond
question, was one branch of his characteristic mute wonderment--it
characterised above all, with its subject before it, his modesty: the
strange dim doubt, waking up for him at the end of the years, of whether
Maggie's mother had, after all, been capable of the maximum. The maximum
of tenderness he meant--as the terms existed for him; the maximum of
immersion in the fact of being married. Maggie herself was capable;
Maggie herself at this season, was, exquisitely, divinely, the maximum:
such was the impression that, positively holding off a little for the
practical, the tactful consideration it inspired in him, a respect for
the beauty and sanctity of it almost amounting to awe--such was the
impression he daily received from her. She was her mother, oh yes--but
her mother and something more; it becoming thus a new light for him,
and in such a curious way too, that anything more than her mother should
prove at this time of day possible.

He could live over again at almost any quiet moment the long process
of his introduction to his present interests--an introduction that
had depended all on himself, like the "cheek" of the young man who
approaches a boss without credentials or picks up an acquaintance, makes
even a real friend, by speaking to a passer in the street. HIS real
friend, in all the business, was to have been his own mind, with which
nobody had put him in relation. He had knocked at the do