Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/321

THE PRINCE event would compel him to live still more under arms. It might mean on the other hand that he found he was happy enough, and that accordingly, so far as she might imagine herself a danger, she was to think of him as prepared in advance, as really seasoned and secure. On his arrival in Paris with his wife, none the less, she had asked for no explanation, just as he himself hadn't asked if the document were still in her possession. Such an enquiry, everything implied, was beneath him—just as it was beneath herself to mention to him uninvited that she had instantly and in perfect honesty offered to show the telegram to Mr. Verver, and that if this companion had but said the word she would immediately have put it before him. She had thereby forborne to call his attention to her consciousness that such an exposure would in all probability at once have dished her marriage; that all her future had in fact for the moment hung by the single hair of Mr. Verver's delicacy (as she supposed they must call it); and that her position in the matter of responsibility was therefore inattackably straight.

For the Prince himself, meanwhile, time, in its measured allowance, had originally much helped him—helped him in the sense of there not being enough of it to trip him up; in spite of which it was just this accessory element that seemed at present, with wonders of patience, to lie in wait. Time had begotten at first, more than anything else, separations, delays and intervals; but it was troublesomely less of an aid from the moment it began so to abound that he had to meet the question of what to do with it. Less of it was required for the state of being married than he had on 291