Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/234

THE GOLDEN BOWL come to him; some light, some idea, some mere happy word perhaps, that he had begun to want, but had been till now, and especially the last day or two, vainly groping for. "Can you really then come if we start early?"—that was practically all he had said to the girl as she took up her bedroom light. And "Why in the world not, when I've nothing else to do and should besides so immensely like it?"—this had as definitely been, on her side, the limit of the little scene. There had in fact been nothing to call a scene, even of the littlest, at all—though he perhaps didn't quite know why something like the menace of one hadn't proceeded from her stopping halfway up stairs to turn and say, as she looked down on him, that she promised to content herself, for their journey, with a toothbrush and a sponge. There hovered about him at all events, while he walked, appearances already familiar, as well as two or three that were new, and not the least vivid of the former connected itself with that sense of being treated with consideration which had become for him, as we have noted, one of the minor, yet, so far as there were any such, quite one of the compensatory, incidents of being a father-in-law. It had struck him up to now that this particular balm was a mixture of which Amerigo, owing to some hereditary privilege, alone possessed the secret; so that he found himself wondering if it had come to Charlotte, who had unmistakeably acquired it, through the young man's having amiably passed it on. She made use, for her so quietly grateful host, however this might be, of quite the same shades of attention and recognition, was mistress in an equal degree of 204