Something in the tone of it gave it a sense, or an ambiguity, almost foolish--leaving Maggie to feel as in a flash how such a consequence, a foredoomed infelicity, partaking of the ridiculous even in one of the cleverest, might be of the very essence of the penalty of wrong-doing. "Oh you may have had fifty--had (191) the same relation with her fifty times! It's of the number of KINDS of relation with her that I speak--a number that does n't matter really so long as there was n't only the one kind father and I supposed. One kind," she went on, "was there before us; we took that fully for granted, as you saw, and accepted it. We never thought of there being another kept out of our sight. But after the evening I speak of I knew there was something else. As I say, I had before that my idea--which you never dreamed I had. From the moment I speak of it had more to go upon, and you became yourselves, you and she, vaguely yet uneasily conscious of the difference. But it's within these last hours that I've most seen where we are; and as I've been in communication with Fanny Assingham about my doubts, so I wanted to let her know my certainty--with the determination of which however you must understand she has had nothing to do. She defends you," Maggie remarked.
He had given her all his attention, and, with this impression for her again that he was in essence fairly reaching out to her for time--time, only time, she could sufficiently imagine, and to whatever strangeness, that he absolutely liked her to talk, even at the cost of his losing almost everything else by it. It was still for a minute as if he waited for something worse; wanted everything that was in her to come out, any definite fact, anything more precisely nameable, so that he too--as was his right--should know where he was. What stirred in him above all, while he followed in her face the clear train of her speech, must have been the impulse to take up something she put (192) before him that he was yet afraid directly to touch. He wanted to make free with it, but had to keep his hands off, for reasons he had already understood; and the discomfort of his privation yearned at her out of his eyes with an announcing gleam of the fever, the none too tolerable chill, of specific recognition. She affected him as speaking more or less for her father as well, and his eyes might have been trying to hypnotise her into giving him the answer without his asking the question. "Had HE his idea, and has he now, with you, anything more?"--those were the words he had to hold himself from not speaking and that she would as yet certainly do nothing to make easy. She felt with her sharpest thrill how he was straitened and tied, and with the miserable pity of it her present conscious purpose of keeping him so could none the less perfectly accord.
To name her father on any such basis of anxiety and compunction would be to do the impossible thing, to do neither more nor less than give Charlotte away. Visibly, palpably, traceably, he stood off from this, moved back from it as from an open chasm now suddenly perceived, but which had been, between the two, with so much, so strangely much else, quite uncalculated.
Verily it towered before her, this history of their confidence. They had built strong and piled high--based as it was on such appearances--their conviction that, thanks to her native complacencies of so many sorts, she would always, quite to the end and through and through, take them as nobly sparing her. Amerigo was at any rate having the sensation of a particular ugliness to avoid, a particular difficulty to count with, that practically found (193) him as unprepared as if he had been, like his wife, an abjectly simple person. And she meanwhile, however abjectly simple, was further discerning for herself that, whatever he might have to take from her--she being, on her side, beautifully free--he absolutely would n't be able for any qualifying purpose to name Charlotte either. As his father-in-law's wife Mrs. Verver rose between them there, for the time, in august and prohibitive form; to protect her, defend her, explain about her, was at the least to bring her into the question--which would be by the same stroke to bring her husband. But this was exactly the door Maggie would n't open to him; on all of which she was the next moment asking herself if, thus warned and embarrassed, he were n't fairly writhing in his pain. He writhed, on that hypothesis, some seconds more, for it was n't till then that he had chosen between what he could do and what he could n't.
"You're apparently drawing immense conclusions from very small matters.