第36章

All this was as pleasant a manner of passing the time as any other, for it didn't prevent his old-world corner from closing round him more entirely, nor stand in the way of his making out from day to day some new source as well as some new effect of its virtue.He was really scared at moments at some of the liberties he took in talk--at finding himself so familiar; for the great note of the place was just that a certain modern ease had never crossed its threshold, that quick intimacies and quick oblivions were a stranger to its air.It had known in all its days no rude, no loud invasion.Serenely unconscious of most contemporary things, it had been so of nothing so much as of the diffused social practice of running in and out.Granger held his breath on occasions to think how Addie would run.There were moments when, more than at others, for some reason, he heard her step on the staircase and her cry in the hall.If he nevertheless played freely with the idea with which we have shown him as occupied it wasn't that in all palpable ways he didn't sacrifice so far as mortally possible to stillness.

He only hovered, ever so lightly, to take up again his thread.She wouldn't hear of his leaving her, of his being in the least fit again, as she said, to travel.She spoke of the journey to London--which was in fact a matter of many hours--as an experiment fraught with lurking complications.He added then day to day, yet only hereby, as he reminded her, giving other complications a larger chance to multiply.He kept it before her, when there was nothing else to do, that she must consider; after which he had his times of fear that she perhaps really would make for him this sacrifice.