It was like his doing penance in sordid ways--being sent to prison or being kept without money; it wouldn't have taken much to make her think of him as really kept without food.

He might have broken away, might easily have started to travel; he had a right--thought wonderful Maggie now--to so many more freedoms than he took! His secret was of course that at Fawns he all the while winced, was all the while in presences in respect to which he had thrown himself back, with a hard pressure, on whatever mysteries of pride, whatever inward springs familiar to the man of the world, he could keep from snapping.

Maggie, for some reason, had that morning, while she watched the sunrise, taken an extraordinary measure of the ground on which he would have HAD to snatch at pretexts for absence.

It all came to her there--he got off to escape from a sound.
The sound was in her own ears still--that of Charlotte's high coerced quaver before the cabinets in the hushed gallery; the voice by which she herself had been pierced the day before as by that of a creature in anguish and by which, while she sought refuge at the blurred window, the tears had been forced into her eyes.

Her comprehension soared so high that the wonder for her became really his not feeling the need of wider intervals and thicker walls.