They had unlimited leisure and an
accumulation of mental energy to devote to any subject that presented
itself; new topics were in fact at a premium. Lydia sometimes had
premonitions of a famine-stricken period when there would he nothing left
to talk about, and she had already caught herself doling out piecemeal
what, in the first prodigality of their confidences, she would have flung
to him in a breath. Their silence therefore might simply mean that they
had nothing to say; but it was another disadvantage of their position that
it allowed infinite opportunity for the classification of minute
differences. Lydia had learned to distinguish between real and factitious
silences; and under Gannett's she now detected a hum of speech to which
her own thoughts made breathless answer.
How could it be otherwise, with that thing between them? She glanced up at
the rack overhead. The _thing_ was there, in her dressing-bag,
symbolically suspended over her head and his. He was thinking of it now,
just as she was; they had been thinking of it in unison ever since they
had entered the train. While the carriage had held other travellers they
had screened her from his thoughts; but now that he and she were alone she
knew exactly what was passing through his mind; she could almost hear him
asking himself what he should say to her....
* * * * *
The thing had come that morning, brought up to her in an innocent-looking
envelope with the rest of their letters, as they were leaving the hotel at
Bologna.
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