Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/278

THE GOLDEN BOWL and overtly, as she carried her head, her high tiara, her folded fan, her indifferent unattended eminence; and it was when he reached her and she could, taking his arm, show herself as placed in her relation, that she felt supremely justified. It was her notion of course that she gave a glimpse of but few of her grounds for this discrimination—indeed of the most evident alone; yet she would have been half-willing it should be guessed how she drew inspiration, drew support, in quantity sufficient for almost anything, from the individual value that, through all the picture, her husband's son-in-law kept for the eye, deriving it from his fine unconscious way, in the swarming social sum, of outshining, overlooking and overtopping. It was as if in separation, even the shortest, she half-forgot or disbelieved how he affected her sight, so that reappearance had in him each time a virtue of its own—a kind of disproportionate intensity suggesting his connexion with occult sources of renewal. What did he do when he was away from her that made him always come back only looking, as she would have called it, "more so"? Superior to any shade of cabotinage, he yet almost resembled an actor who, between his moments on the stage, revisits his dressing-room, and, before the glass, pressed by his need of effect, retouches his make-up. The Prince was at present for instance, though he had quitted her but ten minutes before, still more than then the person it pleased her to be left with—a truth that had all its force for her while he made her his care for their conspicuous return together to the upper rooms. Conspicuous beyond any wish they could entertain 248