The main meaning was that he felt he was going to require them quite as much as she was.

His recognition of the new terms as different from the old, what was that, practically, but a confession that something had happened, and a perception that, interested in the situation she had helped to create, Mrs.Assingham would be, by so much as this, concerned in its inevitable development?
It amounted to an intimation, off his guard, that he should be thankful for some one to turn to.

If she had wished covertly to sound him he had now, in short, quite given himself away, and if she had, even at the start, needed anything MORE to settle her, here assuredly was enough.

He had hold of his small grandchild as they retraced their steps, swinging the boy's hand and not bored, as he never was, by his always bristling, like a fat little porcupine, with shrill interrogation-points--so that, secretly, while they went, she had wondered again if the equilibrium mightn't have been more real, mightn't above all have demanded less strange a study, had it only been on the books that Charlotte should give him a Principino of his own.

She had repossessed herself now of his other arm, only this time she was drawing him back, gently, helplessly back, to what they had tried, for the hour, to get away from--just as he was consciously drawing the child, and as high Miss Bogle on her left, representing the duties of home, was complacently drawing HER.