The Golden Bowl - Henry James (top fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

the least shade of embarrassment. What had made the embarrassment⁠—she called it 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, an 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—beyond 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 instants during which she now believed him to have been harbouring 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 waver. 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 Amerigo 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, and in that 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 behaviour to ring out⁠—on the subject of that poor little behaviour 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, and that there didn’t seem 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 seemed 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, begins 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. They come of themselves⁠—and, ah, they’ve been coming! After all, after all⁠—!” Some such words as those were what didn’t