epressible irony, she applied at different times different names to
the propriety of their case. The wonderful thing was that her sense of
propriety had been, from the first, especially alive about it. There
were hours when she spoke of their taking refuge in what she called the
commonest tact--as if this principle alone would suffice to light their
way; there were others when it might have seemed, to listen to her, that
their course would demand of them the most anxious study and the most
independent, not to say original, interpretation of signs. She talked
now as if it were indicated, at every turn, by finger-posts of almost
ridiculous prominence; she talked again as if it lurked in devious
ways and were to be tracked through bush and briar; and she even, on
occasion, delivered herself in the sense that, as their situation was
unprecedented, so their heaven was without stars. "'Do'?" she once
had echoed to him as the upshot of passages covertly, though briefly,
occurring between them on her return from the visit to America that had
immediately succeeded her marriage, determined for her by this event as
promptly as an excursion of the like strange order had been prescribed
in his own case. "Isn't the immense, the really quite matchless beauty
of our position that we have to 'do' nothing in life at all?--nothing
except the usual, necessary, everyday thing which consists in one's not
being more of a fool than one can help. That's all--but that's as true
for one time as for another. There has been plenty of 'doing,' and there
will doubtless be plenty still; but it's all theirs, every inch of it;
it's all a matter of what they've done TO us." And she showed how
the question had therefore been only of their taking everything as
everything came, and all as quietly as might be. Nothing stranger
surely had ever happened to a conscientious, a well-meaning, a perfectly
passive pair: no more extraordinary decree had ever been launched
against such victims than this of forcing them against their will into a
relation of mutual close contact that they had done everything to avoid.

She was to remember not a little, meanwhile, the particular prolonged
silent look with which the Prince had met her allusion to these primary
efforts at escape. She was inwardly to dwell on the element of the
unuttered that her tone had caused to play up into his irresistible
eyes; and this because she considered with pride and joy that she had,
on the spo