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

to the latter’s level long enough to seem to adventure, marvellously, on a mute appeal. “You understand, don’t you, that if she didn’t do this there would be no knowing what she might do?” This light Mrs. Assingham richly launched while her younger friend, unresistingly moved, became uncertain again, and then, not too much to show it⁠—or, rather, positively to conceal it, and to conceal something more as well⁠—turned short round to one of the windows and awkwardly, pointlessly waited. “The largest of the three pieces has the rare peculiarity that the garlands, looped round it, which, as you see, are the finest possible vieux Saxe, are not of the same origin or period, or even, wonderful as they are, of a taste quite so perfect. They have been put on at a later time, by a process of which there are very few examples, and none so important as this, which is really quite unique⁠—so that, though the whole thing is a little baroque, its value as a specimen is, I believe, almost inestimable.”

So the high voice quavered, aiming truly at effects far over the heads of gaping neighbours; so the speaker, piling it up, sticking at nothing, as less interested judges might have said, seemed to justify the faith with which she was honoured. Maggie meanwhile, at the window, knew the strangest thing to be happening: she had turned suddenly to crying, or was at least on the point of it⁠—the lighted square before her all blurred and dim. The high voice went on; its quaver was doubtless for conscious ears only, but there were verily thirty seconds during which it sounded, for our young woman, like the shriek of a soul in pain. Kept up a minute longer it would break and collapse⁠—so that Maggie felt herself, the next thing, turn with a start to her father. “Can’t she be stopped? Hasn’t she done it enough?”⁠—some such question as that she let herself ask him to suppose in her. Then it was that, across half the gallery⁠—for he had not moved from where she had first seen him⁠—he struck her as confessing, with strange tears in his own eyes, to sharp identity of emotion. “Poor thing, poor thing”⁠—it reached straight⁠—“isn’t she, for one’s credit, on the swagger?” After which, as, held thus together they had still another strained minute, the shame, the pity, the better knowledge, the smothered protest, the divined anguish even, so overcame him that, blushing to his eyes, he turned short away. The affair but of a few muffled moments, this snatched communion yet lifted Maggie as on air⁠—so much, for deep guesses on her own side too, it gave her to think of. There was, honestly, an awful mixture in things, and it was not closed to her aftersense of such passages⁠—we have already indeed, in other cases, seen it open⁠—that the deepest depth of all, in a perceived penalty, was that you couldn’t be sure some of your compunctions and contortions wouldn’t show for ridiculous. Amerigo, that morning, for instance, had been as absent as he at this juncture appeared to desire he should mainly be noted as being; he had gone to London for the day and the night⁠—a necessity that now frequently rose for him and that he had more than once suffered to operate during the presence of guests, successions of pretty women, the theory of his fond interest in whom had been publicly cultivated. It had never occurred to his wife to pronounce him ingenuous, but there came at last a high dim August dawn when she couldn’t sleep and when, creeping restlessly about and breathing at her window the coolness of wooded acres, she found the faint flush of the east march with the perception of that other almost equal prodigy. It rosily coloured her vision that⁠—even such as he was, yes⁠—her husband could on occasion sin by excess of candour. He wouldn’t otherwise have given as his reason for going up to Portland Place in the August days that he was arranging books there. He had bought a great many of late, and he had had others, a large number, sent from Rome⁠—wonders of old print in which her father had been interested. But when her imagination tracked him to the dusty town, to the house where drawn blinds and pale shrouds, where a caretaker and a kitchenmaid were alone in possession, it wasn’t to see him, in his shirtsleeves, unpacking battered boxes.

She saw him, in truth, less easily beguiled⁠—saw him wander, in the closed dusky rooms, from place to place, or else, for long periods, recline on deep sofas and stare before him through the smoke of ceaseless cigarettes. She made him out as liking better than anything in the world just now to be alone with his thoughts. Being herself connected with his thoughts, she continued to believe, more than she had ever been, it was thereby a good deal as if he were alone with her. She made him out as resting so from that constant strain of the perfunctory to which he was exposed at Fawns; and she was accessible to the impression of the almost beggared aspect of this alternative. It was like his doing penance in sordid ways⁠—being sent to prison or being kept without money; it wouldn’t have taken much to make her think of him as really kept without food. He might have broken away, might easily have started to travel; he had a right⁠—thought wonderful Maggie now⁠—to so many more freedoms than he took! His secret was of course that at Fawns he all the while winced, was all the while in presences in respect to which he had thrown himself back, with a hard pressure, on whatever mysteries of pride, whatever inward springs familiar to the man of the world, he could keep from snapping. Maggie, for some reason, had that morning, while she watched the sunrise, taken an extraordinary measure of the ground on which he