To name her father, on any such basis of anxiety, of compunction, would be to do the impossible thing, to do neither more nor less than give Charlotte away.

Visibly, palpably, traceably, he stood off from this, moved back from it as from an open chasm now suddenly perceived, but which had been, between the two, with so much, so strangely much else, quite uncalculated.

Verily it towered before her, this history of their confidence.

They had built strong and piled high--based as it was on such appearances--their conviction that, thanks to her native complacencies of so many sorts, she would always, quite to the end and through and through, take them as nobly sparing her.

Amerigo was at any rate having the sensation of a particular ugliness to avoid, a particular difficulty to count with, that practically found him as unprepared as if he had been, like his wife, an abjectly simple person.
And she meanwhile, however abjectly simple, was further discerning, for herself, that, whatever he might have to take from her--she being, on her side, beautifully free--he would absolutely not be able, for any qualifying purpose, to name Charlotte either.