r's appetite and her own, in
particular, had been kept fresh and grateful. This livelier march of
their intercourse as a whole was the thing that occasionally determined
in him the clutching instinct we have glanced at; very much as if he had
said to her, in default of her breaking silence first: "Everything is
remarkably pleasant, isn't it?--but WHERE, for it, after all, are we?
up in a balloon and whirling through space, or down in the depths of the
earth, in the glimmering passages of a gold-mine?" The equilibrium, the
precious condition, lasted in spite of rearrangement; there had been a
fresh distribution of the different weights, but the balance persisted
and triumphed: all of which was just the reason why she was forbidden,
face to face with the companion of her adventure, the experiment of a
test. If they balanced they balanced--she had to take that; it deprived
her of every pretext for arriving, by however covert a process, at what
he thought.

But she had her hours, thus, of feeling supremely linked to him by the
rigour of their law, and when it came over her that, all the while, the
wish, on his side, to spare her might be what most worked with him, this
very fact of their seeming to have nothing "inward" really to talk about
wrapped him up for her in a kind of sweetness that was wanting, as a
consecration, even in her yearning for her husband. She was powerless,
however, was only more utterly hushed, when the interrupting flash came,
when she would have been all ready to say to him, "Yes, this is by every
appearance the best time we've had yet; but don't you see, all the same,
how they must be working together for it, and how my very success, my
success in shifting our beautiful harmony to a new basis, comes round
to being their success, above all; their cleverness, their amiability,
their power to hold out, their complete possession, in short, of our
life?" For how could she say as much as that without saying a great deal
more? without saying "They'll do everything in the world that suits
us, save only one thing--prescribe a line for us that will make them
separate." How could she so much as imagine herself even faintly
murmuring that without putting into his mouth the very words that would
have made her quail? "Separate, my dear? Do you want them to separate?
Then you want US to--you and me? For how can the one separation take
place without the other?" That was the question that, in spirit, she had
heard h