Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/257

 VII

had talked to her of their waiting in Paris a week later, but on the spot there this period of patience suffered no great strain. He had written to his daughter, not indeed from Brighton, but directly after their return to Fawns, where they spent only forty-eight hours before resuming their journey; and Maggie's reply to his news was a telegram from Rome, delivered to him at noon of their fourth day and which he brought out to Charlotte, who was seated at that moment in the court of the hotel, where they had agreed he should join her for their proceeding together to the noontide meal. His letter, at Fawns—a letter of several pages and intended lucidly, unreservedly, in fact all but triumphantly, to inform—had proved on his sitting down to it and a little to his surprise not quite so simple a document to frame as even his due consciousness of its weight of meaning had allowed him to assume: this doubtless however only for reasons naturally latent in the very wealth of that consciousness, which contributed to his message something of their own quality of impatience. The main result of their talk for the time had been a difference in his relation to his young friend, as well as a difference, equally sensible, in her relation to himself; and this in spite of his not having again renewed his undertaking to "speak" to her so far even as to tell her of the communication dispatched to Rome. 227