Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/160

THE GOLDEN BOWL was it she had in mind, what did she wish to make of him beyond what she had already made, a patient punctilious host, mindful that she had originally arrived much as a stranger, arrived not at all deliberately or yearningly invited?—so that one positively had her possible susceptibilities the more on one's conscience. The Miss Lutches, the sisters from the Middle West, were there as friends of Maggie's, friends of the earlier time; but Mrs. Ranee was there—or at least had primarily appeared—only as a friend of the Miss Lutches.

This lady herself was not of the Middle West—she rather insisted on it—but of New Jersey, Rhode Island or Delaware, one of the smallest and most intimate States: he couldn't remember which, though she insisted too on that. It wasn't in him—we may say it for him—to go so far as to wonder if their group were next to be recruited by some friend of her own; and this partly because she had struck him verily rather as wanting to get the Miss Lutches themselves away than to extend the actual circle, and partly, as well as more essentially, because such connexion as he enjoyed with the ironic question in general resided substantially less in a personal use of it than in the habit of seeing it as easy to others. He was so framed by nature as to be able to keep his inconveniences separate from his resentments; though indeed if the sum of these latter had at the most always been small, that was doubtless in some degree a consequence of the fewness of the former. His greatest inconvenience, he would have admitted had he analysed, was in finding it so taken for granted 130