It would be rude, for that matter, to turn one's back, without a word or two, on an old friend.
Well, as it came to pass, he got the word or two, for Mrs.Assingham's preoccupation was practically simplifying.

The little crisis was of shorter duration than our account of it; duration, naturally, would have forced him to take up his hat.

He was somehow glad, on finding himself alone with Charlotte, that he had not been guilty of that inconsequence.
Not to be flurried was the kind of consistency he wanted, just as consistency was the kind of dignity.

And why couldn't he have dignity when he had so much of the good conscience, as it were, on which such advantages rested?
He had done nothing he oughtn't--he had in fact done nothing at all.

Once more, as a man conscious of having known many women, he could assist, as he would have called it, at the recurrent, the predestined phenomenon, the thing always as certain as sunrise or the coming round of Saints' days, the doing by the woman of the thing that gave her away.