Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/240

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was at Brighton above all that this difference came out; it was during the three wonderful days he spent there with Charlotte that he had acquainted himself further—though doubtless not even now quite completely—with the merits of his majestic scheme. And while moreover, to begin with, he still but held his vision in place, steadying it fairly, with his hands, as he had often steadied for inspection a precarious old pot or kept a glazed picture in its right relation to the light, the other, the outer presumptions in his favour, those independent of what he might himself contribute and that therefore, till he should "speak," remained necessarily vague—that quantity, I say, struck him as positively multiplying, as putting on, in the fresh Brighton air and on the sunny Brighton front, a kind of tempting palpability. He liked, at this preliminary stage, to feel he should be able to "speak" and that he would; the word itself being romantic, pressing for him the spring of association with stories and plays where handsome and ardent young men, in uniforms, tights, cloaks, high-boots, had it, in soliloquies, ever on their lips; and the sense on the first day that he should probably have taken the great step before the second was over conduced already to make him say to his companion that they must spend more than their mere night or two. At his ease on the ground of what was before him he at all events definitely desired 210