Her husband, on taking his place beside her, had, during a minute or two, for her watching sense, neither said nor done anything; he had been, for that sense, as if thinking, waiting, deciding:  yet it was still before he spoke that he, as she felt it to be, definitely acted.  He put his arm round her and drew her close—­ indulged in the demonstration, the long, firm embrace by his single arm, the infinite pressure of her whole person to his own, that such opportunities had so often suggested and prescribed.  Held, accordingly, and, as she could but too intimately feel, exquisitely solicited, she had said the thing she was intending and desiring to say, and as to which she felt, even more than she felt anything else, that whatever he might do she mustn’t be irresponsible.  Yes, she was in his exerted grasp, and she knew what that was; but she was at the same time in the grasp of her conceived responsibility, and the extraordinary thing was that, of the two intensities, the second was presently to become the sharper.  He took his time for it meanwhile, but he met her speech after a fashion.

“The cause of your father’s deciding not to go?”

“Yes, and of my having wanted to let it act for him quietly—­I mean without my insistence.”  She had, in her compressed state, another pause, and it made her feel as if she were immensely resisting.  Strange enough was this sense for her, and altogether new, the sense of possessing, by miraculous help, some advantage that, absolutely then and there, in the carriage, as they rolled, she might either give up or keep.  Strange, inexpressibly strange—­so distinctly she saw that if she did give it up she should somehow give up everything for ever.  And what her husband’s grasp really meant, as her very bones registered, was that she should give it up:  it was exactly for this that he had resorted to unfailing magic.  He knew how to resort to it—­he could be, on occasion, as she had lately more than ever learned, so munificent a lover:  all of which was, precisely, a part of the character she had never ceased to regard in him as princely, a part of his large and beautiful ease, his genius for charm, for intercourse, for expression, for life.  She should have but to lay her head back on his shoulder with a certain movement to make it definite for him that she didn’t resist.  To this, as they went, every throb of her consciousness prompted her—­every throb, that is, but one, the throb of her deeper need to know where she “really” was.  By the time she had uttered the rest of her idea, therefore, she was still keeping her head and intending to keep it; though she was also staring out of the carriage-window with eyes into which the tears of suffered pain had risen, indistinguishable, perhaps, happily, in the dusk.  She was making an effort that horribly hurt her, and, as she couldn’t cry out, her eyes swam in her silence.  With them, all the same, through the square opening beside her, through the grey panorama of the London night, she achieved the feat of not losing sight of what she wanted; and her lips helped and protected her by being able to be gay.  “It’s not to leave you, my dear—­for that he’ll give up anything; just as he would go off anywhere, I think, you know, if you would go with him.  I mean you and he alone,” Maggie pursued with her gaze out of her window.