Upstairs, while she left him to put on something to go out in, the thought of 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 had n'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 (81) beautiful than the way in which, till Charlotte came so much more closely into their life, Amerigo had n'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 unmistakeably 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 stupid little idol; and absolutely now, while she stuck a long pin a trifle fallaciously into her hat--she had, with an (82) approach to irritation, told her maid, a new woman whom she had lately found herself thinking of as abysmal, that she did n't want her--she tried to focus the possibility of some understanding between them in consequence of which he should cut loose.
Very near indeed it looked, any such possibility!--that consciousness too had taken its turn by the time she was ready; all the vibration, all the emotion of this present passage being precisely in the very sweetness of their lapse back into the conditions of the simpler time, into a queer resemblance between the aspect and the feeling of the moment and those of numberless other moments that were sufficiently far away. She had been quick in her preparation, in spite of the flow of the tide that sometimes took away her breath; but a pause once more was still left for her to make, a pause, at the top of the stairs, before she came down to him, in the span of which she asked herself if it were n't thinkable, from the perfectly practical point of view, that she should simply sacrifice him. She did n't go into the detail of what sacrificing him would mean--she did n't need to; so distinct was it, in one of her restless lights, that there he was awaiting her, that she should find him walking up and down the drawing-room in the warm fragrant air to which the open windows and the abundant flowers contributed; slowly and vaguely moving there and looking very slight and young and superficially manageable, almost as much like her child, putting it a little freely, as like her parent; with the appearance about him above all of having perhaps arrived just on purpose to SAY it to her himself in so many words: "Sacrifice (83) me, my own love; do sacrifice me, do sacrifice me!" Should she want to, should she insist on it, she might verily hear him bleating it at her, all conscious and all accommodating, like some precious spotless exceptionally intelligent lamb. The positive effect of the intensity of this figure however was to make her shake it away in her resumed descent; and after she had rejoined him, after she had picked him up, she was to know the full pang of the thought that her impossibility was MADE, absolutely, by his consciousness, by the lucidity of his intention: this she felt while she smiled there for him again all hypocritically; while she drew on fair fresh gloves; while she interrupted the process first to give his necktie a slightly smarter twist and then to make up to him for her hidden madness by rubbing her nose into his cheek according to the tradition of their frankest levity. From the instant she should be able to convict him of intending, every issue would be closed and her hypocrisy would have to redouble. The only way to sacrifice him would be to do so without his dreaming what it might be for. She kissed him, she arranged his cravat, she dropped remarks, she guided him out, she held his arm, not to be led, but to lead him, and taking it to her by much the same intimate pressure she had always used, when a little girl, to mark the inseparability of her doll--she did all these things so that he should sufficiently fail to dream of what they might be for.