Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/352

THE GOLDEN BOWL to him, when once they were all stationed, that his wife too had in perfection her own little character; but he wondered how it managed so visibly to simplify itself—and this, he knew, in spite of any desire she entertained—to the essential air of having overmuch on her mind the felicity, and indeed the very conduct and credit, of the feast. He knew as well the other things of which her appearance was at any time—and in Eaton Square especially—made up: her resemblance to her father, at times so vivid and coming out, in the delicate warmth of occasions, like the quickened fragrance of a flower; her resemblance, as he had hit it off for her once in Rome, during the first flushed days after their engagement, to a little dancing-girl at rest, ever so light of movement but most often panting gently, even a shade compunctiously, on a bench; her approximation, finally—for it was analogy somehow more than identity—to the transmitted images of rather neutral and negative propriety that made up, in his long line, the average of wifehood and motherhood. If the Roman matron had been, in sufficiency, first and last, the honour of that line, Maggie would no doubt, at fifty, have expanded, have solidified to some such dignity, even should she suggest a little but a Cornelia in miniature. A light however broke for him in season, and when once it had done so it made him more than ever aware of Mrs. Verver's vaguely yet quite exquisitely contingent participation—a mere hinted or tendered discretion; in short of Mrs. Verver's indescribable unfathomable relation to the scene. Her placed condition, her natural seat and neighbourhood, her intenser 322