The main result of their talk, for the time, had been a difference in his relation to his young friend, as well as a difference, equally sensible, in her relation to himself; and this in spite of his not having again renewed his undertaking to "speak" to her so far even as to tell her of the communication despatched to Rome.

Delicacy, a delicacy more beautiful still, all the delicacy she should want, reigned between them--it being rudimentary, in their actual order, that she mustn't be further worried until Maggie should have put her at her ease.
It was just the delicacy, however, that in Paris--which, suggestively, was Brighton at a hundredfold higher pitch--made, between him and his companion, the tension, made the suspense, made what he would have consented perhaps to call the provisional peculiarity, of present conditions.

These elements acted in a manner of their own, imposing and involving, under one head, many abstentions and precautions, twenty anxieties and reminders--things, verily, he would scarce have known how to express; and yet creating for them at every step an acceptance of their reality.

He was hanging back, with Charlotte, till another person should intervene for their assistance, and yet they had, by what had already occurred, been carried on to something it was out of the power of other persons to make either less or greater.

Common conventions--that was what was odd--had to be on this basis more thought of; those common conventions that, previous to the passage by the Brighton strand, he had so enjoyed the sense of their overlooking.