She couldn't cross the desert, but she could, and did, beautifully get round it; so that for him to convert it into an obstacle he would have had to cause himself, as in some childish game or unbecoming romp, to be pursued, to be genially hunted.

This last was a turn he was well aware the occasion should on no account take; and there loomed before him--for the mere moment--the prospect of her fairly proposing that they should knock about the balls.

That danger certainly, it struck him, he should manage in some way to deal with.

Why too, for that matter, had he need of defences, material or other ?--how was it a question of dangers really to be called such?
The deep danger, the only one that made him, as an idea, positively turn cold, would have been the possibility of her seeking him in marriage, of her bringing up between them that terrible issue.

Here, fortunately, she was powerless, it being apparently so provable against her that she had a husband in undiminished existence.
She had him, it was true, only in America, only in Texas, in Nebraska, in Arizona or somewhere--somewhere that, at old Fawns House, in the county of Kent, scarcely counted as a definite place at all; it showed somehow, from afar, as so lost, so indistinct and illusory, in the great alkali desert of cheap Divorce.