a certain disagreeable effort, the sort of
effort he had mostly associated with acting for an idea. His idea was
there, his idea was to find out something, something he wanted much to
know, and to find it out not tomorrow, not at some future time, not in
short with waiting and wondering, but if possible before quitting the
place. This particular curiosity, moreover, confounded itself a little
with the occasion offered him to satisfy Mrs. Assingham's own; he
wouldn't have admitted that he was staying to ask a rude question--there
was distinctly nothing rude in his having his reasons. It would be rude,
for that matter, to turn one's back, without a word or two, on an old
friend.

Well, as it came to pass, he got the word or two, for Mrs. Assingham's
preoccupation was practically simplifying. The little crisis was of
shorter duration than our account of it; duration, naturally, would have
forced him to take up his hat. He was somehow glad, on finding himself
alone with Charlotte, that he had not been guilty of that inconsequence.
Not to be flurried was the kind of consistency he wanted, just as
consistency was the kind of dignity. And why couldn't he have dignity
when he had so much of the good conscience, as it were, on which such
advantages rested? He had done nothing he oughtn't--he had in fact
done nothing at all. Once more, as a man conscious of having known many
women, he could assist, as he would have called it, at the recurrent,
the predestined phenomenon, the thing always as certain as sunrise or
the coming round of Saints' days, the doing by the woman of the thing
that gave her away. She did it, ever, inevitably, infallibly--she
couldn't possibly not do it. It was her nature, it was her life, and the
man could always expect it without lifting a finger. This was HIS, the
man's, any man's, position and strength--that he had necessarily the
advantage, that he only had to wait, with a decent patience, to be
placed, in spite of himself, it might really be said, in the right. Just
so the punctuality of performance on the part of the other creature
was her weakness and her deep misfortune--not less, no doubt, than her
beauty. It produced for the man that extraordinary mixture of pity and
profit in which his relation with her, when he was not a mere brute,
mainly consisted; and gave him in fact his most pertinent ground of
being always nice to her, nice about her, nice FOR her. She always
dressed her act up, of course, s