im ask--with its dread train, moreover, of involved and connected
inquiries. Their own separation, his and hers, was of course perfectly
thinkable, but only on the basis of the sharpest of reasons. Well, the
sharpest, the very sharpest, would be that they could no longer afford,
as it were, he to let his wife, she to let her husband, "run" them in
such compact formation. And say they accepted this account of their
situation as a practical finality, acting upon it and proceeding to a
division, would no sombre ghosts of the smothered past, on either side,
show, across the widening strait, pale unappeased faces, or raise, in
the very passage, deprecating, denouncing hands?

Meanwhile, however such things might be, she was to have occasion to say
to herself that there might be but a deeper treachery in recoveries and
reassurances. She was to feel alone again, as she had felt at the issue
of her high tension with her husband during their return from meeting
the Castledeans in Eaton Square. The evening in question had left her
with a larger alarm, but then a lull had come--the alarm, after all, was
yet to be confirmed. There came an hour, inevitably, when she knew, with
a chill, what she had feared and why; it had taken, this hour, a month
to arrive, but to find it before her was thoroughly to recognise it, for
it showed her sharply what Amerigo had meant in alluding to a particular
use that they might make, for their reaffirmed harmony and prosperity,
of Charlotte. The more she thought, at present, of the tone he had
employed to express their enjoyment of this resource, the more it came
back to her as the product of a conscious art of dealing with her. He
had been conscious, at the moment, of many things--conscious even, not a
little, of desiring; and thereby of needing, to see what she would do
in a given case. The given case would be that of her being to a certain
extent, as she might fairly make it out, MENACED--horrible as it was to
impute to him any intention represented by such a word. Why it was that
to speak of making her stepmother intervene, as they might call it, in
a question that seemed, just then and there, quite peculiarly their own
business--why it was that a turn so familiar and so easy should, at the
worst, strike her as charged with the spirit of a threat, was an oddity
disconnected, for her, temporarily, from its grounds, the adventure
of an imagination within her that possibly had lost its way. That,
prec