Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/316

THE GOLDEN BOWL the same fashion. "They'll manage in their own way." With which he got out.

Oh yes, at this, for his companion, it had indeed its effect, and while he mounted their steps she but stared, without following him, at his opening of their door. Their hall was lighted, and as he stood in the aperture looking back at her, his tall lean figure outlined in darkness and with his crush-hat, according to his wont, worn cavalierly, rather diabolically, askew, he seemed to prolong the sinister emphasis of his meaning. In general, on these returns, he came back for her when he had prepared their entrance; so that it was now as if he were ashamed to face her in closer quarters. He looked at her across the interval, and, still in her seat, weighing his charge, she felt her whole view of everything flare up. Wasn't it simply what had been written in the Prince's own face beneath what he was saying?—didn't it correspond with the mocking presence there that she had had her troubled glimpse of? Wasn't, in fine, the pledge that they would "manage in their own way" the thing he had been feeling for his chance to invite her to take from him? Her husband's tone somehow fitted Amerigo's look—the one that had for her so strangely peeped from behind over the shoulder of the one in front. She hadn't then read it—but wasn't she reading it when she now saw in it his surmise that she was perhaps to be squared? She wasn't to be squared, and while she heard her companion call across to her "Well, what's the matter?" she also took time to remind herself that she had decided she couldn't be frightened. The "matter"?—why it was sufficiently the matter, on 286