did give it up
she should somehow give up everything for ever. And what her husband's
grasp really meant, as her very bones registered, was that she SHOULD
give it up: it was exactly for this that he had resorted to unfailing
magic. He KNEW HOW to resort to it--he could be, on occasion, as she had
lately more than ever learned, so munificent a lover: all of which was,
precisely, a part of the character she had never ceased to regard in
him as princely, a part of his large and beautiful ease, his genius for
charm, for intercourse, for expression, for life. She should have but
to lay her head back on his shoulder with a certain movement to make it
definite for him that she didn't resist. To this, as they went, every
throb of her consciousness prompted her--every throb, that is, but one,
the throb of her deeper need to know where she "really" was. By the time
she had uttered the rest of her idea, therefore, she was still keeping
her head and intending to keep it; though she was also staring out of
the carriage-window with eyes into which the tears of suffered pain had
risen, indistinguishable, perhaps, happily, in the dusk. She was making
an effort that horribly hurt her, and, as she couldn't cry out, her eyes
swam in her silence. With them, all the same, through the square opening
beside her, through the grey panorama of the London night, she achieved
the feat of not losing sight of what she wanted; and her lips helped
and protected her by being able to be gay. "It's not to leave YOU, my
dear--for that he'll give up anything; just as he would go off anywhere,
I think, you know, if you would go with him. I mean you and he alone,"
Maggie pursued with her gaze out of her window.

For which Amerigo's answer again took him a moment. "Ah, the dear old
boy! You would like me to propose him something--?"

"Well, if you think you could bear it."

"And leave," the Prince asked, "you and Charlotte alone?"

"Why not?" Maggie had also to wait a minute, but when she spoke it came
clear. "Why shouldn't Charlotte be just one of MY reasons--my not liking
to leave her? She has always been so good, so perfect, to me--but
never so wonderfully as just now. We have somehow been more
together--thinking, for the time, almost only of each other; it has been
quite as in old days." And she proceeded consummately, for she felt it
as consummate: "It's as if we had been missing each other, had got a
little apart--though going on so side by side. B