His acknowledgment of obligation was far from unimportant, but she could find in his grasp of the real itself a kind of ominous intimation.

The intimation appeared to peep at her even out of his next word, lightly as he produced it.
"Isn't it rather as if we had, Charlotte and I, for bringing us together, a benefactor in common ?" And the effect, for his interlocutress, was still further to be deepened.

"I somehow feel, half the time, as if he were her father-in-law too.

It's as if he had saved us both--which is a fact in our lives, or at any rate in our hearts, to make of itself a link.

Don't you remember"-- he kept it up--"how, the day she suddenly turned up for you, just before my wedding, we so frankly and funnily talked, in her presence, of the advisability, for her, of some good marriage ?" And then as his friend's face, in her extremity, quite again as with Charlotte, but continued to fly the black flag of general repudiation: "Well, we really began then, as it seems to me, the work of placing her where she is.