Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/340

THE GOLDEN BOWL effort to protect the father and the daughter seemed necessarily conditioned for them. It moved him, in any case, as if some spring of his own, a weaker one, had suddenly been broken by it. These things, all the while, the privilege, the duty, the opportunity, had been the substance of his own vision; they formed the note he had been keeping back to show her that he wasn't, in their so special situation, without a responsible view. A conception he could name and could act on was something that now at last, not to be too eminent a fool, he was required by all the graces to produce, and the luminous idea she had herself uttered would have been his expression of it. She had anticipated him, but since her expression left, for positive beauty, nothing to be desired, he felt rather righted than wronged. A large response, as he looked at her, came into his face, a light of excited perception, all his own, in the glory of which—as it almost might be called—what he gave her back had the value of what she had given him. "They're extraordinarily happy."

Oh Charlotte's measure of it was only too full. "Beatifically."

"That's the great thing," he went on; "so that it doesn't matter, really, that one doesn't understand. Besides, you do—enough."

"I understand my husband perhaps," she after an instant conceded. "I don't understand your wife."

"You're of the same race, at any rate—more or less; of the same general tradition and education, of the same moral paste. There are things you have in common with them. But I, on my side, as I've gone on trying to see if I haven't some of these things too— 310