his waiting below for her, in possession of the empty house,
brought with it, sharply if briefly, one of her abrupt arrests of
consistency, the brush of a vain imagination almost paralysing her,
often, for the minute, before her glass--the vivid look, in other
words, of the particular difference his marriage had made. The
particular difference seemed at such instants the loss, more than
anything else, of their old freedom, their never having had to think,
where they were together concerned, of any one, of anything but each
other. It hadn't been HER marriage that did it; that had never,
for three seconds, suggested to either of them that they must act
diplomatically, must reckon with another presence--no, not even with her
husband's. She groaned to herself, while the vain imagination lasted,
"WHY did he marry? ah, why DID he?" and then it came up to her more than
ever that nothing could have been more beautiful than the way in which,
till Charlotte came so much more closely into their life, Amerigo hadn't
interfered. What she had gone on owing him for this mounted up again,
to her eyes, like a column of figures---or call it even, if one would,
a house of cards; it was her father's wonderful act that had tipped the
house down and made the sum wrong. With all of which, immediately after
her question, her "Why did he, why did he?" rushed back, inevitably, the
confounding, the overwhelming wave of the knowledge of his reason. "He
did it for ME, he did it for me," she moaned, "he did it, exactly, that
our freedom--meaning, beloved man, simply and solely mine--should be
greater instead of less; he did it, divinely, to liberate me so far as
possible from caring what became of him." She found time upstairs,
even in her haste, as she had repeatedly found time before, to let
the wonderments involved in these recognitions flash at her with their
customary effect of making her blink: the question in especial of
whether she might find her solution in acting, herself, in the spirit of
what he had done, in forcing her "care" really to grow as much less as
he had tried to make it. Thus she felt the whole weight of their case
drop afresh upon her shoulders, was confronted, unmistakably, with the
prime source of her haunted state. It all came from her not having been
able not to mind--not to mind what became of him; not having been able,
without anxiety, to let him go his way and take his risk and lead his
life. She had made anxiety her st