Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/338

THE GOLDEN BOWL sure, scarcely less than he gives himself to yours. It would have taken more than any child of mine," she explained—"it would have taken more than ten children of mine, could I have had them—to keep our sposi apart." She smiled as for the breadth of the image, but as he seemed to take it in spite of this for important she then spoke gravely enough. "It's as strange as you like, but we're immensely alone." He kept vaguely moving, but there were moments when again, with an awkward ease and his hands in his pockets, he was more directly before her. He stood there at these last words, which had the effect of making him for a little throw back his head and, as thinking something out, stare up at the ceiling. "What will you say," she meanwhile asked, "that you've been doing?" This brought his consciousness and his eyes back to her, and she pointed her question. "I mean when she comes in—for I suppose she will, some time, come in. It seems to me we must say the same thing."

Well, he thought again. "Yet I can scarce pretend to have had what I haven't."

"Ah what haven't you had?—what aren't you having?"

Her question rang out as they lingered face to face, and he still took it, before he answered, from her eyes. "We must at least then, not to be absurd together, do the same thing. We must act, it would really seem, in concert."

"It would really seem!" Her eyebrows, her shoulders went up, quite in gaiety, as for the relief this brought her. "It's all in the world I pretend. We 308