Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/303

THE PRINCE the bitterness it would have for her special sensibility. But her companion, from an inward and different need of his own, was presently not deterred by her silence. "What I really don't see is why, from his own point of view—given, that is, his conditions, so fortunate as they stood—he should have wished to marry at all." There it was then—exactly what she knew would come, and exactly, for reasons that seemed now to thump at her heart, as distressing to her. Yet she was resolved meanwhile not to suffer, as they used to say of the martyrs, then and there; not to suffer, odiously, helplessly, in public—which could be prevented but by her breaking off with whatever inconsequence; by her treating their discussion as ended and getting away. She suddenly wanted to go home—much as she had wanted, an hour or two before, to come. She wanted to leave well behind her both her question and the couple in whom it had abruptly taken such vivid form—but it was dreadful to have the appearance of disconcerted flight. Discussion had of itself, to her sense, become danger—such light, as from open crevices, it let in; and the overt recognition of danger was worse than anything else. The worst in fact came while she was thinking how she could retreat and still not overtly recognise. Her face had betrayed her trouble, and with that she was lost. "I'm afraid, however," the Prince said, "that I, for some reason, distress you—for which I beg your pardon. We've always talked so well together—it has been, from the beginning, the greatest pull for me." Nothing so much as such a tone could have quickened her collapse; she felt he had her now 273