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,