 CHAPTER XXIII FANNY on her arrival in town carried out her second idea, dispatching the Colonel to his club for luncheon and packing her maid into a cab for Cadogan Place with the variety of their effects. The result of this for each of the pair was a state of occupation so unbroken that the day practically passed without fresh contact between them. They dined out together, but it was both in going to their dinner and in coming back that they appeared on either side to have least to communicate. Many was wrapped in her thoughts still more closely than in the lemon-colored mantle that protected her bare shoulders, and her husband, with her silence to deal with, showed himself not less disposed than usual, when so challenged, to hold up, as he would have said, his end of it. They had, in general, in these days longer pauses and more abrupt transitions, and one of which latter they found themselves for a climax, launched at midnight. Mrs. Assingham, rather wearily housed again, ascended to the first floor, there to sink overburdened on the landing outside the drawing-room into a great gilded Venetian chair, of which at first, however, she but made, with her brooding face, a sort of throne of meditation. She would thus have recalled a little, with her so free orientalism of type, the immemorially speechless sphinx about at last to become articulate. The colonel, not unlike on his side some old pilgrim of the desert camping at the foot of that monument, went, by way of reconnaissance, into the drawing-room. He visited, according to his want, the windows and their fastenings. He cast round the place the eye all at once of the master and the manager, the commandant and the rate-payer. Then he came back to his wife, before whom, for a moment, he stood waiting. But she herself, for a time, continued to wait, only looking up at him inscrutably. There was, in these minor maneuvers and conscious-patiences, something of a suspension of their old custom of a divergent discussion, that intercourse by misunderstanding which had grown so clumsy now. This familiar pleasantry seemed to desire to show it could yield, on occasion, to any clear trouble, though it was also sensibly, and just incoherently, in the air that no trouble was at present to be vulgarly recognized as clear. There might, for that matter, even have been in Mr. Asingham's face a mild perception of some finer sense, a sense for his wife's situation, and the very situation she was oddly enough about to repudiate, that she had fairly caused to grow in him. But it was a flower to breathe upon gently, and this was very much what she finally did. She knew he needed no telling that she had given herself all the afternoon to her friends in Eaton Square, and that her doing so would have been but the prompt result of impressions gathered in quantities in brimming baskets, like the purple grapes of the vintage at Machum, a process surrounded by him, while it so unmistakably went on, with abstentions and discretions that might almost have counted as salemnities. The salemnities, at the same time, had committed him to nothing, to nothing beyond this confession itself of a consciousness of deep waters. She had been out on these waters for him visibly, and his tribute to the fact had been his keeping her, even if without a word, well in sight. He had not quitted for an hour during her adventure, the shore of the Mystic Lake. He had on the contrary stationed himself where she could signal to him at need. Her need would have arisen if the planks of her bark had parted. Then some sort of plunge would have become his immediate duty. His present position clearly was out of seeing her in the center of her sheet of dark water, and of wondering if her actual mute gaze at him didn't perhaps mean that her planks were now parting. He held himself so ready that it was quite as if the inward man had pulled off coat and waistcoat. Before he had plunged, however, that is, before he had uttered a question, he perceived, not without relief, that she was making for land. He watched her steadily paddle, always a little nearer, and at last he felt her boat bump. The bump was distinct, and in fact she stepped ashore. We were all wrong. There's nothing. Nothing. It was like giving her his hand up the bank. Being Charlotte Verver and the Prince, I was uneasy but I'm satisfied now. I was in fact quite mistaken. There's nothing. But I thought, said Bob Asingham, that that was just what you did persistently asseverate. You've guaranteed there's straightness from the first. No. I have never till now guaranteed anything but my own disposition to worry. I have never till now, Fanny went on gravely from her chair, had such a chance to see and to judge. I had it at that place, if I had in my infatuation and my folly, she added with expression, nothing else. So I did see. I have seen. And now I know. Her emphasis, as she repeated the word, made her head, in her seat of infallibility, rise higher. I know. The Colonel took it, but took it at first in silence. Do you mean they've told you? No. I mean nothing so absurd, for in the first place I haven't asked them, and in the second their word in such a matter wouldn't count. Oh, said the Colonel with all his oddity. They'd tell us. It made her face him an instant as with her old impatience of his shortcuts always across her finest flower beds, but she felt none the less that she kept her irony down. Then when they've told you, you'll be perhaps so good as to let me know. He jerked up his chin, testing the growth of his beard with the back of his hand while he fixed her with a single eye. Ah, I don't say that they'd necessarily tell me that they are over the traces. They'll necessarily, whatever happens, hold their tongues, I hope, and I'm talking of them now as I take them for myself only. That's enough for me. It's all I have to regard. With which after an instant. They're wonderful, said Fanny Asingham. Indeed, her husband concurred, I really think they are. You'd think it's still more if you knew, but you don't know because you don't see. Their situation—this was what he didn't see—is too extraordinary. Too—he was willing to try. Too extraordinary to be believed, I mean, if one didn't see, but just that, in a way, is what saves them. They take it seriously. He followed at his own pace. Their situation—the incredible side of it—they make it incredible. Credible, then, you do say, to you. She looked at him again for an interval. They believe in it themselves. They take it for what it is, and that, she said, saves them. But if what it is is just their chance, it's their chance for what I told you when Charlotte first turned up. It's their chance for the idea that I was then sure she had. The colonel showed his effort to recall. Oh, your idea at different moments of any one of their ideas. This dim procession visibly mustered before him, and with the best will in the world he could but watch its immensity. Are you speaking now of something to which you can comfortably settle down? Again for a little she only glowered at him. I've come back to my belief, and that I have done so. Well, he asked as she paused. Well, shows that I'm right, for I assure you I had wandered far. Now I'm at home again, and I mean, said Fanny Asingham, to stay here. They're beautiful, she declared. The Prince and Charlotte. The Prince and Charlotte. That's how they're so remarkable. The beauty, she explained, is that they're afraid for them, afraid I mean for the others. For Mr. Verver and Maggie, it did take some following. Afraid of what? Afraid of themselves. The colonel wondered. Of themselves? Of Mr. Verver's and Maggie's selves? Mrs. Asingham remained patient as well as lucid. Yes, of such blindness too, but most of all of their own danger. He turned it over. That danger being the blindness, that danger being their position, what their position contains of all the elements I needn't at this time of day attempt to tell you. It contains, luckily, for that's the mercy, everything but blindness. I mean on their part. The blindness, said Fanny, is primarily her husband's. He stood for a moment. He would have it straight. Whose husband's? Mr. Verver's, she went on. The blindness is most of all his, that they feel that they see, but it's also his wife's. Whose wife's? He asked, as she continued to gloom at him in a manner at variance with the comparative cheer of her contention, and then, as she only gloomed, the princes, Maggie's own, Maggie's very own, she pursued as for herself, he had a pause. Do you think, Maggie, so blind? The question isn't of what I think. The questions of the conviction that guides the prince and Charlotte, who have better opportunities than I for judging. The Colonel again wondered, are you so very sure their opportunities are better? Well, his wife asked, what is their whole so extraordinary situation, their extraordinary relation? But an opportunity. My dear, you have that opportunity of their extraordinary situation and relation, as much as they. With the difference, darling, she returned with some spirit, that neither of those matters are, if you please, mine. I see the both therein, but I'm not thank God in it myself. Today, however, Mrs. Assingham added, today in Eaton Square I did see. Well, then, what? But she mused over it still. Oh, many things, more somehow than ever before. It was as if God helped me, I was seeing for them, I mean for the others. It was as if something had happened. I don't know what, except some effect of these days with them at that place, that had either made things come out or had cleared my own eyes. These eyes indeed of the poor ladies rested on her companions, meanwhile, with the luster not so much of an tensor insight, as of a particular portent that he had at various other times had occasion to recognize. She desired, obviously, to reassure him, but it apparently took a couple of large, candid, gathering, glittering tears to emphasize the fact. They had immediately, for him, their usual direct action. She must reassure him, he was made to feel, absolutely in her own way. He would adopt it and conform to it as soon as he should be able to make it out. The only thing was that it took such incalculable twists and turns. The twist seemed remarkable, for instance, as she developed her indication of what had come out in the afternoon. It was as if I knew better than ever what makes them, what makes them, he pressed her as she fitfully dropped. Well, makes the Prince and Charlotte take it all as they do. It might well have been difficult to know how to take it, and they might even say for themselves that they were a long time trying to see. As I say today, she went on. It was as if I were suddenly with a kind of horrible push, seeing through their eyes, on which, as to shake off her perversity, fanny-assing them sprang up. But she remained there under the dim illumination, and while the colonel, with his high, dry, spare look of type, to which a certain conformity to the whiteness of inaccessible snows and his necktie, shirt front and waistcoat, gave a rigor of access. Waited watching her, they might, at the last hour and in the still house, have been a pair of specious, worldly adventurers, driven for relief, under sudden stress, to some grim midnight reckoning in an odd corner. Her attention moved mechanically over the objects of ornament disposed too freely on the walls of staircase and landing, as to which recognition, for the time, had lost both fondness and compunction. I can imagine the way it works, she said. It's so easy to understand. Yet I don't want to be wrong. She the next moment broke out. I don't. I don't want to be wrong. To make a mistake, you mean. Oh no, she meant nothing of the sort. She knew but too well what she meant. I don't make mistakes, but I perpetrate in thought, crimes. And she spoke with all intensity. I'm a most dreadful person. There are times when I seem not to mind a bit what I've done or what I think or imagine or fear or accept, when I feel that I do it again, feel that I do things myself. Ah, my dear, the Colonel remarked in the coolness of debate. Yes, if you had driven me back on my nature, luckily for you you never have. You've done everything else but you've never done that. But what I really don't a bit want, she declared, is to abet them or to protect them. Her companion turned this over. What is there to protect them from, if by your now so settled faith they've done nothing that justly exposes them? And it in fact half pulled her up. Well, from a sudden scare, from the alarm I mean of what Maggie may think. Yet if your whole idea is that Maggie thinks nothing, she waited again. It isn't my whole idea, nothing is my whole idea, for I felt today as I tell you that there's so much in the air. Oh, in the air, the Colonel dryly breathed. Well, what's in the air always has, hasn't it, to come down to the earth. And Maggie, Mrs. Assingham continued, is a very curious little person. Since I was in, this afternoon, for seeing more than I had ever done. Well, I felt that too, for some reason, as I hadn't yet felt it. For some reason? For what reason? And then as his wife at first said nothing. Did she give any sign? Was she in any way different? She's always so different from anyone else in the world that it's hard to say when she's different from herself. But she has made me, said Fanny after an instant, think of her differently. She drove me home. Home here? First to Portland Place, on her leaving her father, since she does once in a while leave him. That was to keep me with her a little longer. But she kept the carriage, and after tea there came with me herself back here. This was also for the same purpose. Then she went home, though I had brought her a message from the Prince that arranged their movements otherwise. He and Charlotte must have arrived, if they have arrived, expecting to drive together to Eaton Square and keep Maggie on to dinner there. She has everything there, you know. She has clothes. The Colonel didn't in fact know, but he gave it his apprehension. Oh, you mean a change? Twenty changes, if you like, all sorts of things. She dresses really, Maggie does, as much for her father, and she always did, as for her husband or for herself. She has her room in his house very much as she had it before she was married. And just as the boy has quite a second nursery there, in which Mrs. Noble, when she comes with him, makes herself, I assure you, at home. CBN, that if Charlotte, in her own house, so to speak, should wish a friend or two to stay with her, she really would be scarce able to put them up. It was a picture into which, as a thrifty entertainer himself, Bob Asingham could more or less enter. Maggie and the Child spread so. Well, he considered. It is rather rum. That's all I claim. She seemed thankful for the word. I don't say it's anything more, but it is distinctly rum. Which after an instant the Colonel took up. More? What more could it be? It could be that she's unhappy, and that she takes her funny little way of consoling herself. For if she were unhappy, Mrs. Asingham had figured it out, that's just the way I'm convinced she would take. But how can she be unhappy, since I'm also convinced she, in the midst of everything, adores her husband as much as ever? The Colonel at this brooded for a little at large. Then if she's so happy, please, what's the matter? It made his wife almost spring at him. You think, then, she's secretly wretched? But he threw up his arms in deprecation. Oh, my dear, I give them up to you. I have nothing more to suggest. Then it's not sweet of you. She spoke at present as if he were frequently sweet. You admit that it is rum. And this, indeed, fixed again for a moment his intention. Has Charlotte complained of the want of rooms for her friends? Never that I know of a word. It isn't the sort of thing she does, and whom she doesn't know. Never that I know of a word. It isn't the sort of thing she does, and whom has she, after all, Mrs. Assingham added, to complain to. Hasn't she always you? Oh, me, Charlotte and I, nowadays. She spoke as if a chapter closed. Yet see the justice I still do her? She strikes me more and more as extraordinary. A deeper shade at the renewal of the word had come into the Colonel's face. If they're each and all so extraordinary, then, isn't that why one must just resign oneself to wash one's hands of them to be lost? Her face, however, so met the question as if it were but a flicker of the old tone that their trouble had now become too real for. Her charged eyes so betrayed the condition of her nerves that he stepped back, alertly enough to firm her ground. He had spoken before in this light of a plain man's vision, but he must be something more than a plain man now. Hasn't she then, Charlotte, always her husband? To complain to. She'd rather die. Oh, and Bob Assingham's face at the vision of such extremities lengthened for very docility. Hasn't she the Prince, then? For such matters? Oh, he doesn't count. I thought that was just what, as the basis of our agitation, he does do. Mrs. Assingham, however, had her distinction ready. Not a bit as a person to bore with complaints. The ground of my agitation is, exactly, that she never on any pretext bores him. Not Charlotte. And in the imagination of Mrs. Verver's superiority to any such mistake she gave, characteristically, something like a toss of her head, as marked her tribute to that lady's general grace in all the conditions, as the personages referred to doubtless had ever received. Ah, only Maggie, with which the carnal gave a short, low gurgle, but it found his wife again prepared. No, not only Maggie, a great many people in London, and small wonder, bore him. Maggie only worst, then? But it was a question that he had promptly dropped at the returning brush of another, of which she had shortly before sown the seed. You said just now that he would by this time be back with Charlotte, if they have arrived. You think it then possible that they really won't have returned? His companion exhibited a view for the idea, a sense of her responsibility, but this was insufficient clearly to keep her from entertaining it. I think there's nothing they're not now capable of, and they're so intense, good faith. Good faith. He echoed the words which had in fact something of an odd ring, critically. Their false position. It comes to the same thing. And she bore down with her decision, the superficial lack of sequence. They may very possibly for a demonstration, as I see them, not have come back. He wondered visibly at this, how she did see them. May have bolted somewhere together. May have stayed over it, match them itself till tomorrow. May have wired home each of them since Maggie left me. May have done. Fanny Asingham continued. God knows what. She went on suddenly with more emotion, which at the pressure of some spring of her inner vision, broke out on a wail of distress and perfectly smothered. Whatever they've done I shall never know. Never, never, because I don't want to and because nothing will induce me, so they may do as they like, but I've worked for them all. She uttered this last with another irrepressible quaver, and the next moment her tears had come, though she had, with the explosion, quitted her husband as if to hide it from him. She passed into the dusky drawing-room, where during his own prowl, shortly previous, he had drawn up a blind so that the light of the street lamps came in a little at the window. She made for this window against which she leaned her head, while the colonel with his lengthened face looked after her for a minute and hesitated. He might have been wondering what she had really done to what extent beyond his knowledge or his conception in the affairs of these people she could have committed herself. But to hear her cry, and yet try not to, was quickly enough too much for him. He had known her at other times quite not try not to, and that had not been so bad. He went to her and put his arm round her. He drew her head to his breast, where, while she gasped, she let it stay a little, all with the patience that presently stilled her. Yet the effect of this small crisis, oddly enough, was not to close their colloquy with the natural result of sending them to bed. What was between them had opened out further, had somehow, through the sharp show of her feeling, taken a positive stride, had entered, as it were, without more words, the region of the understood, shutting the door after it and bringing them so still more nearly face to face. They remained for some minutes looking at it through the dim window which opened upon the world of human trouble in general, in which let the vague light play here and there upon guilt and crystal and color, the floored features looming dimly a fanny's drawing room, and the beauty of what thus passed between them passed with her cry of pain, with her burst of tears, with his wonderment and his kindness and his comfort, with the moments of their silence, above all, which might have represented their sinking together, hand in hand for a time, and to the mystic lake where he had begun, as we have hinted, by seeing her paddle alone, the beauty of it was that they now could really talk better than before, because the basis had at last, once for all, defined itself. What was the basis which Fanny absolutely exacted, but that Charlotte and the Prince must be saved, so far as consistently speaking of them as still safe might save them? It did save them somehow for Fanny's troubled mind, for that was the nature of the mind of women. He conveyed to her now, at all events, by refusing her no gentleness, that he had sufficiently got the tip, and that the tip was all he had wanted. This remained quite clear, even when he presently reverted to what she had told him of her recent passage with Maggie. I don't altogether see you know what you infer from it, or why you infer anything. When he so expressed himself, it was quite as if in possession of what they had brought up from the depths. End of Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Of the Golden Bowl This is LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Leanne Howlett. The Golden Bowl by Henry James. Book 3, Chapter 24 I can't say more, this made his companion reply, than that something in her face, her voice and her whole manner acted upon me as nothing in her had ever acted before, and just for the reason, above all, that I felt her trying her very best, and her very best, poor duck, is very good, to be quiet and natural. It's when one sees people who always are natural, making little pale, pathetic, blinking efforts for it, then it is that one knows something's the matter. I can't describe my impression, you would have had it for yourself, and the only thing that ever can be the matter with Maggie is that. By that I mean her beginning to doubt, to doubt for the first time, Mrs. Assingham wound up, of her wonderful little judgment of her wonderful little world. It was impressive, Fanny's vision, and the Colonel, as if himself agitated by it, took another turn of prowling. To doubt of fidelity, to doubt of friendship, poor duck indeed, it will go hard with her, but she'll put it all, he concluded, on Charlotte. Mrs. Assingham, still darkly contemplative, denied this with a head shake. She won't put it anywhere, she won't do with it anything anyone else would, she'll take it all herself. You mean she'll make it out her own fault? Yes, she'll find means somehow to arrive at that. Ah, then, the Colonel dutifully declared, she's indeed a little brick. Oh, his wife returned, you'll see, in one way or another, to what tune. And she spoke of a sudden, with an approach to elation, so that, as if immediately feeling his surprise, she turned round to him. She'll see me somehow through. See you? Yes, me. I'm the worst. For, said Fanny Assingham, now with a harder exultation, I did it all. I recognize that, I accept it. She won't cast it up at me, she won't cast up anything, so I throw myself upon her. She'll bear me up. She spoke almost voluble, she held him with her sudden sharpness. She'll carry the whole weight of us. There was still, nevertheless, wonder in it. You mean she won't mind? I say, love. And he not unkindly stared. Then where's the difficulty? There isn't any, Fanny declared with the same rich emphasis. It kept him, indeed, as by the loss of the thread, looking at her longer. Ah, you mean there isn't any for us. She met his look for a minute as if it perhaps a little too much imputed a selfishness, a concern at any cost, for their own surface. Then she might have been deciding that their own surface was, after all, what they had most to consider. Not, she said with dignity, if we properly keep our heads. She appeared even to signify that they would begin by keeping them now. This was what it was to have it last a constituted basis. Do you remember what you said to me that night of my first real anxiety after the Foreign Office Party? In the carriage, as we came home. Yes, he could recall it. Leave them to pull through. Precisely, trust their own wit, you practically said, to save all appearances. Well, I've trusted it. I have left them to pull through. He hesitated. And your point is that they're not doing so? I've left them, she went on. But now I see how and where. I've been leaving them all the while without knowing it to her. To the Princess? And that's what I mean, Mrs. Assing impensively pursued. That's what's happened to me with her today, she continued to explain. She came home to me that that's what I've really been doing. Oh, I see. I needn't torment myself, she has taken them over. The Colonel declared that he saw, yet it was as if at this he a little sightlessly stared. But what then has happened from one day to the other to her? What has opened her eyes? They were never really shut, she misses him. Then why hasn't she missed him before? Well, facing him there among their domestic glooms and glints, Fanny worked it out. She did, but she wouldn't let herself know it. She had her reason, she wore her blind. Now at last her situation has come to a head. Today she does know it, and that's illuminating. It has been, Mrs. Assing him wound up, illuminating to me. He hasn't attended, but the momentary effect of his attention was vagueness again, and the refuge of his vagueness was a gasp. Poor dear little girl. Ah, no, don't pity her. This did, however, pull him up. We mayn't even be sorry for her? Not now, or at least not yet. It's too soon, that is, if it isn't very much too late. This will depend, Mrs. Assing him went on, at any rate we shall see. We might have pitied her before, for all the good it would then have done her. We might have begun some time ago. Now, however, she has begun to live, and the way it comes to me, the way it comes to me, but again she projected her vision. The way it comes to you can scarcely be that she'll like it. The way it comes to me is that she will live. The way it comes to me is that she'll triumph. She said this was so sudden a prophetic flair that it fairly cheered her husband. Ah, then we must back her. No, we mustn't touch her. We mayn't touch any of them. We must keep our hands off. We must go on tiptoe. We must simply watch and wait. And meanwhile, said Mrs. Assing him, we must bear it as we can. That's where we are, and serves us right. We're in presence. And so moving about the room is in communion with shadowy portents. She left it till he questioned again. In presence of what? Well, of something possibly beautiful. Beautiful as it may come off. She had paused there before him while he wondered. You mean she'll get the prince back? She raised her hand in quick impatience. The suggestion might have been almost abject. It isn't a question of recovery. It won't be a question of any vulgar struggle. To get him back, she must have lost him. And to have lost him, she must have had him. With which Fanny shook her head. What I take her to be waking up to is the truth that all the while she really hasn't had him. Never. Oh, my dear. The poor Colonel panted. Never, his wife repeated. And she went on without pity. Do you remember what I said to you long ago, that evening, just before their marriage, when Charlotte had so suddenly turned up? The smile with which he met this appeal was not it was to be feared robust. What haven't you loved, said in your time? So many things no doubt that they make a chance for my having once or twice spoken the truth. I never spoke it more, at all events, than when I put it to you that evening, that Maggie was the person in the world to whom a wrong thing could least be communicated. It was as if her imagination had been closed to it. Her sense altogether sealed. That, therefore, Fanny continued, is what will now have to happen. Her sense will have to open. I see, he nodded, to the wrong. He nodded again, almost cheerfully, as if he had been keeping the peace with a baby or a lunatic. To the very, very wrong. But his wife's spirit, after its effort of wing, was able to remain higher. To what's called evil with a very big E for the first time in her life, to the discovery of it, to the knowledge of it, to the crude experience of it, and she gave, for the possibility, the largest measure. To the harsh, bewildering brush, the daily chilling breath of it, unless indeed—and here, Mrs. Asingham noted a limit— unless indeed, as yet, so far as she has come, and if she comes no further, simply to the suspicion and the dread, what we shall see is whether that mere dose of alarm will prove enough. He considered. But enough for what, then, dear, if not enough to break her heart? Enough to give her a shaking, Mrs. Asingham rather oddly replied. To give her, I mean, the right one. The right one won't break her heart. It will make her, she explained. Well, it will make her, by way of a change, understand one or two things in the world. But isn't it a pity, the Colonel asked, that they should happen to be the one or two that will be the most disagreeable to her? Oh, disagreeable. They'll have had to be disagreeable to show her a little where she is. They'll have had to be disagreeable to make her sit up. They'll have had to be disagreeable to make her decide to live. Bob Asingham was now at the window, but his companion slowly revolved. He had lighted a cigarette for final patience, and he seemed vaguely to time her as she moved to and fro. He had at the same time to do justice to the lucidity she had at last attained, and it was doubtless by way of expression of this teachability that he let his eyes, for a minute, roll as from the force of feeling over the upper dusk of the room. He had thought of the response of his wife's words, ideally implied. Decide to live. Ah, yes, for her child. Oh, bother her child! And he had never felt so snubbed for an exemplary view as when Fannie now stopped short. To live, you poor dear, for her father, which is another pair of sleeves. And Mrs. Asingham's whole, ample, ornamented person irradiated with this, a youth that had begun under so much handling to glow. Any idiot can do things for her child. She'll have a mode of more original, and we shall see how it will work her. She'll have to save him. To save him. To keep her father from her own knowledge. That, and she seemed to see it before her and her husband's very eyes, will be work cut out, with which, as at the highest conceivable climax, she wound up their colloquy. Good night. There was something in her manner, however, or in the effect, at least, of this supreme demonstration that had, fairly, and by a single touch, lifted him to her side, so that after she had turned her back to regain the landing and the staircase, he overtook her, before she had begun to mount, with the ring of excited perception. Ah, but you know, that's rather jolly. Jolly? She turned upon it again at the foot of the staircase. I mean, it's rather charming. Charming? It had still to be their law a little, that she was tragic when he was comic. I mean, it's rather beautiful. You just said yourself it would be. Only, he pursued promptly with the impetus of this idea, as if it had suddenly touched with light for him, connections hitherto dim. Only I don't quite see why that very care for him, which has carried her to such other lengths precisely, as effect one is so rum, hasn't also by the same stroke, made her notice a little more what has been going on. Ah, there you are. It's the question that I've all along been asking myself. She had rested her eyes on the carpet, she raised them as she pursued, she let him have it straight. And it's the question of an idiot. An idiot? Well, the idiot that I've been, in all sorts of ways, so often of late have I asked it. You're excusable since you ask it but now. The answer I saw today has all the while been staring at me in the face. Then what in the world is it? Why, the very intensity of her conscience about him, the very passion of her brave little piety, that's the way it has worked, Mrs. Asingham explained. And I admit it to have been as rum away as possible, but it has been working from a rum start, from the moment the dear man married to ease his daughter off, and it then happened by an extraordinary perversity that the very opposite effect was produced. With the renewed vision of this fatality, however, she could give but a desperate shrug. I see, the colonel sympathetically mused. That was a rum start. But his very response, as she again flung up her arms, seemed to make her sense for a moment intolerable. Yes, there I am. I was really at the bottom of it, she declared. I don't know what possessed me, but I planned for him. I goaded him on. With which, however, the next moment she took herself up. Or rather, I do know what possessed me. For wasn't he beset with ravening women right and left, and didn't he quite pathetically appeal for protection? Didn't he quite charmingly show one how he needed and desired it? Maggie, she thus lucidly continued, couldn't, with a new life of her own, give herself up to doing for him in the future all she had done in the past, to fencing him in, to keeping him safe and keeping them off. One perceived this, she went on, out of the abundance of one's affection and one's sympathy. It all blessedly came back to her, when it wasn't all for the fiftieth time obscured in face of the present facts by anxiety and compunction. One was no doubt a meddlesome fool, one always is to think one sees people's lives for them better than they see them for themselves. But one's excuse here, she insisted, was that these people clearly didn't see them for themselves, didn't see them at all. It struck one for very pity that they were making a mess of such charming material, that they were but wasting it and letting it go. They didn't know how to live, and somehow one couldn't, if one took an interest in them at all, simply stand and see it. That's what I pay for. And the poor woman in straighter communion with her companion's intelligence at this moment, she appeared to feel, then she had ever been before, let him have the whole of the burden of her consciousness. I always pay for it sooner or later, my sociable, my damnable, my unnecessary interest. Nothing, of course, would suit me, but that it should fix itself also on Charlotte, Charlotte who was hovering there on the edge of our lives when not beautifully and a trifle mysteriously impressed them and who was a piece of waste and a piece of threatened failure just as for any possible good to the world Mr. Verver and Maggie were. It began to come over me in the watches of the night that Charlotte was a person who could keep off ravening women without being one herself either in the vulgar way of the others, and that this service to Mr. Verver would be a sweet employment for her future. There was something, of course, that might have stopped me. You know, you know what I mean. It looks at me, she veritably moaned, out of your face, but all I can say is that it didn't. The reason largely being, once I had fallen in love with the beautiful symmetry of my plan, that I seemed to feel sure Maggie would accept Charlotte, whereas I didn't quite make out either what other woman or what other kind of woman one could think of her accepting. I see, I see. She had paused, meeting all the while, his listening look, and the fever of her retrospect had so risen with her talk that the desire was visibly strong in him to meet her, on his side, but with cooling breath. One quite understands, my dear. It only, however, kept her there somber. I naturally see love which you understand, which sits again perfectly in your eyes. You see that I saw that Maggie would accept her in helpless ignorance. Yes, dearest, and the grimness of her dreariness suddenly once more possessed her. You've only to tell me that that knowledge was my reason for what I did. How, when you do, can I stand up to you? You see, she said with an ineffable head shake, that I don't stand up. I'm down, down, down, she declared. Yet, she has quickly added, there's just one little thing that helps to save my life. And she kept him waiting but an instant. They might easily, they would perhaps even certainly, have done something worse. He thought, worse than that Charlotte. Ah, don't tell me, she cried, that there could have been nothing worse. There might as they were have been many things. Charlotte in her way is extraordinary. He was almost simultaneous, extraordinary. She observes the forms, said Vanny Asingham. He hesitated. With the Prince, for the Prince, and with the others she went on, with Mr. Verver wonderfully, but above all with Maggie, and the forms she had to do even them justice. Are two-thirds of conduct. Say he had married a woman who would have made a hash of them. But he jerked back. Ah, my dear, I wouldn't say it for the world. Say, she nonetheless pursued, he had married a woman the Prince would really have cared for. You mean, then, he doesn't care for Charlotte? This was still a new view to jump to, and the Colonel perceptibly wished to make sure of the necessity of the effort. For that, while he stared, his wife allowed him time, at the end of which she simply said, No. Then what on earth are they up to? Still, however, she only looked at him, so that standing there before her with his hands in his pockets, he had time further to risk soothingly another question. Are the forms you speak of that are two-thirds of conduct? What will be keeping her now by your hypothesis from coming home with him till morning? Yes, absolutely, their forms. There's Maggie's and Mr. Verver's, those they impose on Charlotte and the Prince, those she developed, that so perversely as I say, they have succeeded in setting themselves up as the right ones. He considered, but only now at last, really to relapse and to woe. Your perversity, my dear, is exactly what I don't understand. The state of things existing hasn't grown, like a field of mushrooms and a night. Whatever they all round may be in for now is at least the consequence of what they've done. Are they mere helpless victims of fate? Well, Fanny at last had the courage of it. Yes, they are, to be so abjectly innocent, that is to be victims of fate. And Charlotte and the Prince are abjectly innocent. It took her another minute, but she rose to the full height. Yes, that is, they were, as much so in their way as the others. There were beautiful intentions all round. The princes and Charlotte's were beautiful. Of that I had my faith. They were. I'd go to the stake. Otherwise, she added, I should have been a wretch, and I've not been a wretch. I've only been a double-died donkey. Ah, then, he asked, what does our muddle make them to have been? Well, too much taken up with considering each other. You may call such a mistake as that by whatever name you please. It at any rate means all round their case. It illustrates the misfortune, said Mrs. Asingham gravely, of being too, too charming. This was another matter that took some following, but the Colonel again did his best. Yes, but to whom? Doesn't it rather depend on that? To whom have the Prince and Charlotte then been too charming? To each other in the first place, obviously, and then both of them together to Maggie. To Maggie, he wonderingly echoed, to Maggie, she was now crystalline. By having accepted from the first so guilelessly, yes, so guilelessly themselves, her guileless idea of still having her father, of keeping him fast in her life, then isn't one supposed in common humanity, and if one hasn't quarreled with him, and one has the means, and he on his side doesn't drink or kick up rows, isn't one supposed to keep one's aged parent in one's life? Certainly, when there aren't particular reasons against it, that there may be others than his getting drunk is exactly the moral of what is before us. In the first place, Mr. Verver isn't aged. The Colonel just hung fire, but it came. Then why the deuce does he, oh poor dear man, behave as if he were? She took a moment to meet it. How do you know how he behaves? Well, my own love, we see how Charlotte does. Again at this, she faltered, but again she rose. Ah, isn't my whole point that he's charming to her? Doesn't it depend a bit on what she regards as charming? She faced the question as if it were flippant, then with a head shake of dignity she brushed it away. It's Mr. Verver who's really young, it's Charlotte who's really old, and what I was saying, she added, isn't affected. You were saying, he did her the justice, that they're all guileless. That they were, guileless all at first, quite extraordinarily. It's what I mean by their failure to see that the more they took for granted they could work together, the more they were really working apart. For I repeat, Fanny went on, that I really believe Charlotte and the Prince honestly to have made up their minds originally that their very esteem for Mr. Verver, which was serious as well it might be, would save them. I see, the Colonel inclined himself, and save him. It comes to the same thing. Then save Maggie. That comes, said Mrs. Asingham, to something a little different, for Maggie has done the most. He wondered, what do you call the most? Well, she did it originally. She began the vicious circle. For that, though you make round eyes at my associating her with vice, is simply what it has been. It's their mutual consideration all round that is made at the bottomless gulf, and they're really so embroiled, but because in their way they've been so improbably good. In their way, yes, the Colonel grinned. Which was, above all, Maggie's way. No flicker of his rivalry was anything to her now. Maggie had in the first place to make up to her father for her having suffered herself to become, poor little dear, as she believed, so intensely married. Then she had to make up to her husband for taking so much of the time they might otherwise have spent together to make this reparation to Mr. Verver perfect. And her way to do this precisely was by allowing the Prince to use the enjoyment, whatever you may call it, of Charlotte to cheer his path by instalments, as it were, in proportion to she herself making sure her father was all right might be missed from his side. By so much at the same time, however, Mrs. Assingham further explained, by so much as she took her young stepmother for this purpose away from Mr. Verver, by just so much did this too strike her as something again to be made up for. It has saddled her, you will easily see, with a positively new obligation to her father. An obligation created and aggravated by her unfortunate, even if quite heroic, little sense of justice. She began with wanting to show him that his marriage could never, under whatever temptation of her own bliss with the Prince, become for her a pretext for deserting or neglecting him. Then that, in its order, entailed her wanting to show the Prince that she recognised how the other desire, this wish to remain intensely the same passionate little daughter she had always been, involved in some degree, and just for the present, so to speak, her neglecting and deserting him. I quite hold, fanny with characteristic amplitude parenthesised, that a person can mostly feel but one passion, one tender passion that is at a time. Only that doesn't hold good for our primary and instinctive attachments, the voice of blood, such as one's feeling for a parent or a brother. Those may be intense and yet not prevent other intensities, as you will recognise, my dear, when you remember how I continued to bemon, to adore my mother, whom you didn't adore for years after I had begun to adore you. Well, Maggie, she kept it up, is in the same situation as I was, plus complications from which I was, thank heaven, exempt. Plus the complication above all, of not having in the least begun with a sense for complications that I should have had. Before she knew it at any rate, her little scruples and her little lucidities, which were really so divinely blind, her feverish little sense of justice, as I say, had brought the two others together as her grossest misconduct couldn't have done, and now she knows something or other has happened, yet hasn't here to fore known what. She has only piled up her remedy, poor child, something that she probably, but confusedly seen as her necessary policy, piled it on top of the policy, on top of the remedy, that she had first thought out for herself, and that would really have needed since then so much modification. Her only modification has been the growth of her necessity to prevent her father's wondering if all in their life in common may be so certainly for the best. She has now as never before to keep him unconscious that it's peculiar, if he makes a point of it, as their situation is, there's anything in it all uncomfortable or disagreeable, anything morally the least out of the way. She has to keep touching it up to make it each day, each month look natural and normal to him, so that, God forgive me the comparison, she's like an old woman who has taken to painting, and who has to lay it on thicker, to carry it off with a greater audacity, with a greater sense even, the older she grows. And Fanny stood a moment captivated with the image she had thrown off. I like the idea of Maggie audacious and impudent, learning to be so to gloss things over. She could, she even will yet I believe, learn it for that sacred purpose consummately, diabolically, for from the moment the dear man should see it's all rouge, she paused, staring at the vision. It imparted itself even to Bob. Then the fun would begin. As it but made her look at him hard, however, he amended the form of his inquiry. You mean that in that case she will charming creature be lost? She was silent a moment more. As I've told you before she won't be lost if her father's saved, she'll see that as innovation enough. The Colonel took it in. Then she's a little heroine. Rather she's a little heroine. But it's his innocence above all, Mrs. Asingham added, that will pull them through. Her companion at this focused again Mr. Verver's innocence. It's awfully quaint. Of course it's awfully quaint. That it's awfully quaint that the pair are awfully quaint, quaint with all our dear old quaintness by which I don't mean yours and mine, but that of my own sweet country people from whom I've so deplorably degenerated. That, Mrs. Asingham declared, was originally the head in front of their appeal to me and of my interest in them. And, of course, I shall feel them quaint her still, she rather ruefully subjoined, before they've done with me. This might be, but it wasn't what most stood in the Colonel's way. You believe so of Mr. Verver's innocence after two years of Charlotte? She stared. But the whole point is just that two years of Charlotte are what he hasn't really, or what you may call undividedly, had. Any more than Maggie, by your theory a, has really or undividedly had four of the Prince? It takes all she hasn't had, the Colonel conceded, to account for the innocence that in her too, so leaves us in admiration. So far as it might be ribald again, she left this pass. It takes a great many things to account for Maggie. What is definite at all events is that, strange though this be, her effort for her father has up to now sufficiently succeeded. She has made him, she makes him, except the tolerably obvious oddity of their relation all round for part of the game. Behind her there, protected and amused and, as it were, exquisitely humbugged, the Principino in whom he delights, always aiding, he has safely and serenely enough suffered the conditions of his life to pass for those he had sublimely projected. He hadn't worked them out in detail any more than I had, heaven pity me, and the queerness has been exactly this for him is what it was to have married Charlotte. And they both, she neatly wound up, help. Both. I mean that if Maggie, always in the breach, makes it seem to him also flourishingly to fit, Charlotte does her part not less, and her part is very large. Charlotte, Fanny declared, works like a horse. So there it all was, the husband looked at her a minute across it. And what does the Prince work like? She fixed him in return. Like a Prince. Whereupon, breaking short off to ascend to her room, she presented her highly decorated back, in which in odd places controlling the complications of its aspect, the ruby or the garnet, the turquoise and the topaz, gleamed like faint symbols of the wit that pinned together the traces of her argument. He watched her as if she left him positively under the impression of her mastery of her subject. Yes, as if the real upshot of the drama before them was but that he had, when it came to the tight places of life, as life had shrunk for him now, the most luminous of wives. He turned off in this view of her majestic retreat the comparatively faint little electric lamp which had presided over their talk. Then he went up as immediately behind her as the billows of her amber train allowed, making out how all the clearness they had conquered was even for herself a relief, how at last the sense of the amplitude of her exposition sustained and floated her. Joining her, however, on the landing above, where she had already touched a metallic point into light, he found she had done perhaps even more to create than to extinguish in him the curiosity. He held her a minute longer there was another plum in the pie. What did you mean some minutes ago by his not caring for Charlotte? The princes by his not really caring she recalled after a little benevolently enough I mean that men don't when it has all been too easy. That's how in nine cases out of ten a woman is treated for her life. You asked me just now how he works she added. But you might better perhaps have asked me how he plays. Well, he made it up. Like a prince like a prince he is profoundly a prince for that she said with expression. He's beautifully a case. They're far rarer even in the highest circles and they pretend to be so much of his value. He's perhaps one of the very last the last of the real ones so it is we must take him we must take him all round. The Colonel considered and how must Charlotte if anything happens take him. The question held her a minute and while she waited with her eyes on him she put out a grasping hand to his arm in the flesh of which he felt her answer distinctly enough registered thus she gave him standing off a little the firmest longest deepest injunction he had ever received from her nothing in spite of everything will happen nothing has happened nothing is happening he looked a trifle disappointed I see for us for us for whom else and he was to feel indeed how she wished him to understand it we know nothing on earth it was an undertaking he must sign so he wrote as it were his name we know nothing on earth it was like the soldier's watchword at night where as innocent she went on the same way as babes why not rather say he asked as innocent as they themselves are oh for the best of reasons because we're much more so he wondered but how can we be more for them oh easily we can be anything absolute idiots then absolute idiots and oh fanny breathe the way it will rest us well he looked as if there were something in that but won't they know they're not she barely hesitated Charlotte and the Prince think we are which is so much gained Mr. Verver believes in our intelligence but he doesn't matter and Maggie doesn't she know that we see before our noses yes this indeed took longer oh so far she may guess it she'll give no sign so it comes to the same thing he raised his eyebrows comes to our not being able to help her that's the way we shall help her by looking like fools she threw up her hands she only wants herself to look like a bigger so there we are with which she brushed it away his conformity was promised something however still held her it broke to her own vision as a last wave of clearness moreover now she said I see I mean she added what you were asking me how I knew today in Eaton Square that Maggie's awake and she had indeed visibly got it it was by seeing them together seeing her with her father he fell behind again but you've seen her often enough before never with my present eyes for nothing like such a test that of this length of the other's absence together has hitherto occurred possibly but if she and Mr. Verver insisted upon it why is it such a test because it has become one without their intending it it has spoiled so to speak on their hands it is sour day the colonel said the words horrible say rather it has changed perhaps Fanny went on she did wish to see how much she can bear in that case she has seen only it was she alone who about the visit insisted her father insists on nothing and she watches him do it her husband looked impressed watches him for the first faint sign I mean of his noticing it doesn't as I tell you come but she's there for it to see and I felt she continued how she's there I caught her as it were in the fact she couldn't keep it from me though she left her post on purpose came home with me to throw dust in my eyes I took it all her dust but it was what showed me with which supreme lucidity she reached the door of her room luckily it showed me also how she has succeeded nothing from him has come you're so awfully sure sure nothing will good night she said she'll die first end of chapter 24 chapter 25 of the golden bowl this is a Libervox recording all Libervox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libervox.org recording by Leanne Howlett the golden bowl by Henry James chapter 24 the princess chapter 25 it was not till many days had passed that the princess began to accept the idea of having done a little something she was not always doing or indeed that of having listened to any inward voice that spoke in a new tone yet these instinctive postponements of reflection were the fruit positively of recognitions and perceptions already active since above all that she had made at a particular hour made by the mere touch of her hand a difference in the situation so long present to her is practically unattackable this situation had been occupying for months and months the very center of the garden of her life but it had reared itself there like some strange tall tower of ivory or perhaps rather some wonderful beautiful but outlandish pagoda a structure plated with hard bright porcelain colored and figured and adorned at the overhanging eaves with silver bells that tinkled ever so charmingly when stirred by chance airs she had walked round and round it that was what she felt she had carried on her existence in the space left her for circulation a space that sometimes seemed ample and sometimes narrow looking up all the while at the fair structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high but never quite making out as yet where she might have entered had she wished she had not wished till now such was the odd case and what was doubtless equally odd besides was that though her raised eyes seemed to distinguish places that must serve from within and especially far aloft as apertures and outlooks no door appeared to give access from her convenient garden level the great decorated surface had remained consistently impenetrable and inscrutable at present however to her considering mind it was as if she had ceased merely to circle and to scan the elevation ceased so vaguely so quite helplessly to stare and wonder she had caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing then in that of lingering and finally in that of stepping unprecedentedly near the thing might have been by the distance at which it kept her a Mohammedan mosque with which no base heretic could take a liberty there so hung about at the vision of one's putting off one's shoes to enter and even verily of one's paying with one's life if found there is an interloper she had not certainly arrived at the conception of paying with her life for anything she might do but it was nevertheless quite as if she had sounded with a tap or two one of the rare porcelain plates she had knocked in short though she could scarce have said whether for admission or for what she had applied her hand to a cool smooth spot and had waited to see what would happen something had happened it was as if a sound at her touch after a little had come back to her from within a sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted if this image however may represent our young woman's consciousness of a recent change in her life a change now but a few days old it must at the same time be observed that she both sought and found a renewed circulation as I have called it a measure of relief from the idea of having perhaps to answer for what she had done the pagoda in her blooming garden figured the arrangement by which so strikingly she had been able to marry without breaking, as she liked to put it with the past she had surrendered herself to her husband without the shadow of a reserve or a condition and yet she had not all the while given up her father the least little inch she had compassed the high city of seeing the two men beautifully take to each other and nothing in her marriage had marked it as more happy than this fact of having practically given the elder the lonelier a new friend what had moreover all the while enriched the whole aspect of success was that the latter's marriage had been no more measurably paid for than her own his having taken the same great step in the same free way had not in the least involved the relegation of his daughter that it was remarkable they should have been able at once together had never for a moment from however far back been equivocal to her that it was remarkable had in fact quite counted at first and always and for each of them equally as part of their inspiration and their support there were plenty of singular things they were not enamored of flights of brilliancy of audacity of originality that speaking at least for the dear man and herself were not at all in their line but they like to think they had given their life this unusual extension and this liberal form which many families, many couples and still more many pairs of couples would not have found workable that last truth had been distinctly brought home to them by the bright testimony the quite explicit envy of most of their friends who had remarked to them again and again that they must on all the showing to keep on such terms be people of the highest amiability equally including in the praise of course Amorigo and Charlotte it had given them pleasure as how should it not define themselves shed such a glamour it had certainly that is given pleasure to her father and herself both of them distinguishably of a nature so slow to presume that they would scarce have been sure of their triumph without this pretty reflection of it so it was that their felicity had fructified so it was that the ivory tower visible and admirable doubtless from any point of the social field had risen stage by stage Maggie's actual reluctance to ask herself a proportionate sharpness why she had ceased to take comfort in the sight of it represented accordingly elapsed from that ideal consistency on which her moral comfort depended to remain consistent she had always been capable of cutting down more or less her prior term moving for the first time in her life as in the darkening shadow of a false position she reflected that she should either not have ceased to be right that is to be confident or have recognized that she was wrong though she tried to deal with herself for a space only as a silk encoded spaniel and who rattles the water from his ears her shake of her head again and again as she went was much of that order and she had the resource to which save for the rude equivalent of his generalizing bark the spaniel would have been a stranger of humming to herself hard as a sign that nothing had happened to her she had not so to speak fallen in she had had no accident and had not got wet this at any rate was her pretension until after she began a little to wonder if she might not with or without exposure have taken cold she could at all events remember no time at which she had felt so excited and certainly none which was another special point that so brought with it as well the necessity for concealing excitement this birth of a new eagerness became a high pastime in her view precisely by reason of the ingenuity required for keeping the thing born out of sight the ingenuity was thus a private and absorbing exercise in the light of which might I so far multiply my metaphors I should compare her to the frightened but clinging young mother of an unlawful child the idea that had possession of her would be by our new analogy the proof of her misadventure but likewise all the while only another sign of a relation that was more to her than anything on earth she had lived long enough to make out for herself that any deep-seated passion has its pangs as well as its joys and that we are made by its aches and its anxieties most richly conscious of it she had never doubted of the force of the feeling that bound her to her husband but to become aware almost suddenly that it had begun to vibrate with the violence that had some of the effect of her strain would rightly looked at after all but show that she was like thousands of women every day acting up to the full privilege of passion why in the world shouldn't she with every right if on consideration she saw no good reason against it the best reason against it would have been the possibility of some consequence disagreeable or inconvenient to others especially to such others to the egotism of their passions but if once that danger were duly guarded against the fullness of one's measure amounted to no more than the equal use of one's faculties or the proper playing of one's part it had come to the princess obscurely at first but little by little more conceivably that her faculties had not for a good while been concomitantly used the case resembled in a manner that of her once loved dancing a matter of remembered steps that had grown vague from her ceasing to go to balls she would go to balls again that seemed freely even crudely stated the remedy she would take out of the depercepticles in which she had laid them away the various ornaments congruous with the greater occasions and of which her store she liked to think was none of the smallest she would have been easily to be figured for us at this occupation dipping at off moments in quiet hours and snatched visits and by droughty candlelight and to her rich collections and seeing her jewels again a little shyly but all unmistakably glow that in fact may pass as the very picture of her semi smothered agitation of the diversion she to some extent successfully found in referring her crisis so far as was possible to the mere working of her own needs it must be added however that she would have been at a loss to determine, and certainly at first to which order that of self-control or that of large expression the steps she had taken the afternoon of her husband's return from matchum with his companion properly belonged for it had been a step distinctly on Maggie's part her deciding to do something just then and there which would strike Amarigo as unusual and this even though her departure from custom had merely consisted in her so arranging that he wouldn't find her as he would definitely expect to do in Eaton Square he would have strangely enough as might seem to him to come back home for it and there get the impression of her rather pointedly or at least all impatiently and independently awaiting him these were small variations and mild maneuvers but they went to accompanied on Maggie's part as we have mentioned with an infinite sense of intention her watching by his fireside for her husband's return from an absence might superficially have presented itself as the most natural act in the world and the only one into the bargain on which he would positively have reckoned it fell by this circumstance into the order of plain matters and yet the very aspect by which it was in the event handed over to her brooding fancy was the fact that she had done with it all she had designed she had put her thought to the proof and the proof had shown its edge this was what was before her that she was no longer playing with blunt and idle tools with weapons that didn't cut there passed across her vision ten times a day the gleam of a bare blade and at this it was that she most shut her eyes most knew the impulse to cheat herself with motion and sound she had merely driven on a certain Wednesday to Portland Place instead of remaining in Eaton Square and she privately repeated it again and again there had appeared beforehand no reason why she should have seen the mantle of history flung by a single sharp sweep over so commonplace a deed that all the same was what it happened it had been bitten into her mind all in an hour that nothing she ever done would hear after in some way yet to be determined so count for her perhaps not even what she had done in accepting in their old golden Rome Amorigo's proposal of marriage and yet by her little crouching posture there that of a timid Tigris she had meant nothing recklessly ultimate nothing clumsily fundamental so that she called it names the invidious the grotesque hold holding it up to her own ridicule reducing so far as she could the portee of what had followed it she had but wanted to get nearer nearer to something indeed that she couldn't that she wouldn't even to herself describe and the degree of this achieved nearness was what had been in advance incalculable her actual multiplication of distractions and suppressions whatever it did for her failed to prevent her living over again any chosen minute for she could choose them she could fix them of the freshness of relation produced by her having administered to her husband the first surprise to which she had ever treated him it had been a poor thing but it had been all her own and the whole passage was backwardly there a great picture hung on the wall of her daily life for her to make what she would have it fell for retrospect into a succession of moments that were watchable still almost in the manner of the different things done during a scene on the stage some scenes so acted as to have left a great impression on the tenet of one of the stalls several of these moments stood out beyond the others and those she could feel again most count again like the firm pearls on a string had belonged more particularly to the lapse of time before dinner dinner which had been so late quite at nine that evening thanks to the final lateness of Amorigo's own advent these were parts of the experience though in fact there had been a good many of them between which her impression could continue sharply to discriminate before the subsequent passages much later on it was to be said the flame of memory turned to an equalizing glow that of a lamp in some side chapel in which incense was thick the great moment at any rate for conscious repossession was doubtless the first the strange little time silence which she had fully gauged on the spot is altogether beyond her own intention but which for just how long should she ever really know for just how long she could do nothing to break she was in the smaller drawing room in which she always sat and she had by calculation dressed for dinner on finally coming in it was a wonder how many things she had calculated in respect to this small incident a matter for the importance of which she had so quite indefinite a measure he would be late he would be very late that was the one certainty that seemed to look her in the face there was still also the possibility that if he drove with Charlotte straight to Eden Square he might think it best to remain there even on learning she had come away she had left no message for him such chance this was another of her small shades of decision though the effect of it might be to keep him still longer absent he might suppose she would already have dined he might stay with all he would have to tell just on purpose to be nice to her father she had known him to stretch the point to these beautiful ends far beyond that he had more than once stretched it to the sacrifice of the opportunity of dressing if she herself had now avoided any such sacrifice and had made herself during the time at her disposal quite inordinately fresh and quite positively smart this had probably added while she waited and waited to that very tension of spirit in which she was afterwards to find the image of her having crouched she did her best quite intensely by herself to banish any such appearance she couldn't help it if she couldn't read her pale novel that par exempt was beyond her but she could at least sit by the lamp with the book sit there with her newest frock worn for the first time sticking out all round her quite stiff and grand even perhaps a little too stiff and too grand for a familiar and domestic frock yet marked none the less this time she ventured to hope by incontestable intrinsic merit she had glanced repeatedly at the clock she had refused herself the weak indulgence of walking up and down though the act of doing so she knew would make her feel on the polished floor with the rustle and the hang still more beautifully bedecked the difficulty was that it would also make her feel herself still more sharply in a state which was exactly what she proposed not to do the only drops of her anxiety had been when her thoughts strayed complacently with her eyes to the front of her gown which was in a manner a refuge a beguilement especially when she was able to fix it long enough to wonder if it would at last really satisfy Charlotte she had ever been in respect to her clothes rather timorous and uncertain for the last year above all she had lived in the light of Charlotte's possible and rather inscrutable judgment of them Charlotte's own were simply the most charming and interesting that any woman had ever put on there was a kind of poetic justice in her being at last able in this particular thanks to means thanks quite to omnipotence freely to exercise her genius but Maggie would have described herself as in these connections constantly and intimately torn conscious on one side of the impossibility of copying her companion and conscious on the other of the impossibility of sounding her independently to the bottom yes it was one of the things she should go down to her grave without having known how Charlotte after all had been said really thought her stepdaughter looked under any supposedly ingenious personal experiment she had always been lovely about the stepdaughter's material braveries had done for her the very best with them but there had ever fitfully danced at the back of Maggie's head the suspicion that these expressions were mercies not judgments absolute but only a relative frankness hadn't Charlotte was so perfect to critical vision if the truth were known given her up as hopeless hopeless by a serious standard and thereby invented for her a different and inferior one in which is the only thing to be done she patiently and soothingly abetted her hadn't she in other words assented in secret despair perhaps even in secret irritation to her being ridiculous so that the best now possible was to wonder once in a great while whether one mightn't give her the surprise of something a little less out of the true note than usual something of this kind was the question that Maggie while the absentees still delayed asked of the appearance she was endeavoring to present but with the result repeatedly again that it only went and lost itself in the thick air that had begun more and more to hang for our young woman the accumulations of the unanswered they were there these accumulations they were like a room full of confused objects never as yet sorted which for some time now she had been passing and repassing along the corridor of her life she passed it when she could without opening the door then on occasion she turned the key to throw in a fresh contribution so it was that she had been getting things out of the way they rejoined the rest of the confusion it was as if they found their place by some instinctive affinity in the heap they knew in short where to go and when she at present by a mental act once more pushed the door open she had practically a sense of method and experience what she should never know about Charlotte's thought she tossed that in it would find itself in company and she might at last have been standing there long enough to see it fall into its corner the sight moreover would doubtless have made her stare had her attention been more free the sight of the mass of vain things congruence incongruous that awaited every addition it made her in fact with a vague gasp turn away and what had further determined this was the final sharp extinction of the inward scene by the outward the quite different door had opened and her husband was there it had been as strange as she could consent afterwards to think it it had been essentially what had made the abrupt bend in her life he had come back had followed her from the other house visibly uncertain this was written in the face he for the first minute showed her it had been written only for those seconds and they had appeared to go quickly after they began to talk but while it lasted it had been written large and though she didn't quite know of him she felt she hadn't expected the least shade of embarrassment what had made the embarrassment she called that embarrassment so as to be able to assure herself she put it at the very worst what had made the particular look was his thus distinguishably wishing to see how he should find her why first that had later on kept coming to her the question dangled there as if it were the key to everything with the sense of it on the spot she had felt overwhelmingly that she was significant that so she must instantly strike him and that this had a kind of violence beyond what she had intended it was in fact even at the moment not absent from her view that he might easily have made an abject fool of her at least for the time she had indeed for just ten seconds been afraid of some such turn the uncertainty in his face had become so the next thing the uncertainty in the very air three words of impatience the least bit loud some outbreak of what in the world are you up to and what do you mean any note of that sort would instantly have brought her low and this all the more that heaven knew she hadn't in any manner designed to be high it was such a trifle her small breach with custom or at any rate with his natural presumption that all magnitude of wonder had already had before one could deprecate the shadow of it the effect of a complication it had made for him some difference that she couldn't measure this meeting him at home and alone instead of elsewhere and with others and back and back it kept coming to her that the blankness he showed her before he was able to see might, should she choose to insist on it have a meaning have as who should say an historic value of the importance of momentary expressions in general she had naturally had on the spot no ready notion of what he might want to see it was enough for a ready notion not to speak of a beating heart that he did see that he saw his wife in her own drawing room at the hour when she would most properly be there he hadn't in any way challenged her it was true and after those instance during which she now believed him to have been harboring the impression of something unusually prepared and pointed in her attitude and array he had advanced upon her smiling and smiling and thus without hesitation at the last had taken her into his arms the hesitation had been at the first and she at present saw that he had surmounted it without her help she had given him no help for if on the one hand she couldn't speak for hesitation so on the other and especially as he didn't ask her she couldn't explain why she was agitated she had known it all the while down to her toes known it in his presence with fresh intensity and if he had uttered but a question it would have pressed in her the spring of recklessness it had been strange that the most natural thing of all to say to him should have had that appearance but she was more than ever conscious that any appearance she had would come round more or less straight to her father whose life was now so quiet on the basis accepted for it that any alteration of his consciousness even in the possible sense of enlivenment would make their precious equilibrium waiver that was at the bottom of her mind that their equilibrium was everything and that it was practically precarious a matter of a hair's breadth for the loss of the balance it was the equilibrium or at all events her conscious fear about it that had brought her heart into her mouth and the same fear was on either side in the silent look she and Amorigo had exchanged the happy balance that demanded this amount of consideration was truly thus as by its own confession a delicate matter but that her husband had also his habit of anxiety and his general caution only brought them after all more closely together it would have been most beautifully therefore in the name of the equilibrium of her joy at their feeling so exactly the same about it that she might have spoken if she had permitted the truth on the subject of her behavior to wring out on the subject of that poor little behavior which was for the moment so very limited a case of eccentricity why, why have I made this evening such a point of our not all dining together well because I've all day been so wanting you alone that I finally couldn't bear it any great reason why I should try to that came to me funny as it may at first sound with all the things we've so wonderfully got into the way of bearing for each other you've seen these last days I don't know what more absent than ever before too absent for us merely to go on so it's all very well and I perfectly see how beautiful it is all round but there comes a day when something snaps when the full cup filled to the very brim to flow over that's what has happened to my need of you the cup all day has been too full to carry so here I am with it spilling it over you and just for the reason that is the reason of my life after all I've scarcely to explain that I'm as much in love with you now as the first hour except that there are some hours which I know when they come because they almost frighten me that show me I'm even more so in awe they've been coming after all after all some such words as those weren't what didn't ring out yet it was as if even the unuttered sound had been quenched here in its own quaver it was where utterance would have broken down by its very weight if he had let it get so far without that extremity at the end of a moment he had taken in what he needed to take that his wife was testifying the Lord and missed and desired him after all after all since she put it so she was right that was what he had to respond to that was what from the moment that as has been said he saw he had to treat as the most pertinent thing possible he held her close and long an expression of their personal reunion this obviously was one way of doing so he rubbed his cheek tenderly and with a deep vague murmur against her face that side of her face she was not pressing to his breast that was not less obviously another way and there were ways enough and short for his extemporized ease for the good humor she was afterwards to find herself thinking of as his infinite tact this last was partly no doubt because the question of tact might be felt as having come up at the end of a quarter of an hour during which he had liberally talked and genuinely questioned he had told her of his day the happy thought of his roundabout journey with Charlotte all their cathedral-hunting adventure and how it had turned out rather more of an affair than they expected the moral of it was at any rate that he was tired verily and must have a bath and dress to which end she would kindly excuse him for the shortest time possible she was to remember afterwards something that had passed between them on this how he had looked for her during an instant at the door before going out how he had met her asking him in hesitation first then quickly in decision whether she couldn't help him by going up with him he had perhaps also for a moment hesitated but he had declined her offer and she was to preserve as I say the memory of the smile with which he had opined that at that rate they wouldn't die until ten o'clock and that he should go straighter and faster such things as I say were to come back to her they played through her full aftersense like lights on the whole impression the subsequent parts of the experience were not to have blurred their distinctness one of these subsequent parts the first had been the not inconsiderable length to her later and more analytic consciousness of this second wait for her husband's reappearance she might certainly with the best will in the world had she gone up with him have been more in his way than not since people could really almost always hurry better without help than with it still she could actually hardly have made him take more time than he struck her taking though it must indeed be added that there was now in this much thinking little person state of mind no mere crudity of impatience something had happened rapidly with the beautiful sight of him and with the drop of her fear made him by making him go to and fro substance of the fearsome for Maggie's spirit was always at first positive emergence of the sweet and it was long since anything had been so sweet to her as the particular quality suddenly given by her present emotion to the sense of possession End of Chapter 25