THE AMERICAN
life about anything—of fantastic straits or splendid miseries in the midst of which, standing before her with wide arms out, he would have seen her let herself, even if still just desperately and blindly, make for his close embrace as for a refuge.
He really would n't have minded if some harsh need for mere money had most driven her; the creak of that hinge would have been sweet to him had it meant the giving way of the door of separation. What he wanted was to take her, and that her feeling herself taken should come back to him for their common relief. The full surrender, so long as she did n't make it, left the full assurance an unrest and a yearning—from which all his own refuge was in the fine ingenuity, the almost grim extravagance, of the prospective provision he was allowing to accumulate. She gave him the sense of suiting him so, exactly as she was, that his desire to interpose for her and close about her had something of the quality of that solicitude with which a fond mother might watch from the window even the restricted garden-play of a child recovering from an accident. But he was above all simply charmed, and the more for feeling wonderstruck, as the days went on, at the proved rightness both of the instinct and of the calculation that had originally moved him. It was as if there took place for him, each day, such a revelation of the possible number of forms of the "personal" appeal as he could otherwise never have enjoyed, and as made him yet ask himself how, how, all unaided (save as Mrs. Tristram, subtle woman, had aided him!) he could have known. For he had, amazingly, known.
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