had made out in those hours, and also, of a truth, during the days which
immediately followed, little more than the strangeness of a relation
having for its chief mark--whether to be prolonged or not--the absence
of any "intimate" result of the crisis she had invited her husband to
recognise. They had dealt with this crisis again, face to face, very
briefly, the morning after the scene in her room--but with the odd
consequence of her having appeared merely to leave it on his hands. He
had received it from her as he might have received a bunch of keys or a
list of commissions--attentive to her instructions about them, but only
putting them, for the time, very carefully and safely, into his
pocket. The instructions had seemed, from day to day, to make so little
difference for his behaviour--that is for his speech or his silence;
to produce, as yet, so little of the fruit of action. He had taken from
her, on the spot, in a word, before going to dress for dinner, all she
then had to give--after which, on the morrow, he had asked her for more,
a good deal as if she might have renewed her supply during the night;
but he had had at his command for this latter purpose an air of
extraordinary detachment and discretion, an air amounting really to an
appeal which, if she could have brought herself to describe it vulgarly,
she would have described as cool, just as he himself would have
described it in any one else as "cheeky"; a suggestion that she should
trust him on the particular ground since she didn't on the general.
Neither his speech nor his silence struck her as signifying more, or
less, under this pressure, than they had seemed to signify for weeks
past; yet if her sense hadn't been absolutely closed to the possibility
in him of any thought of wounding her, she might have taken his
undisturbed manner, the perfection of his appearance of having recovered
himself, for one of those intentions of high impertinence by the aid of
which great people, les grands seigneurs, persons of her husband's class
and type, always know how to re-establish a violated order.

It was her one purely good fortune that she could feel thus sure
impertinence--to HER at any rate--was not among the arts on which he
proposed to throw himself; for though he had, in so almost mystifying
a manner, replied to nothing, denied nothing, explained nothing,
apologised for nothing, he had somehow conveyed to her that this was not
because of any determination to t