Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/381

THE PRINCE pretty well as a rule take for granted. What were they doing at this very moment, wonderful creatures, but trying to outdo each other in his interest?—from Maggie herself, most wonderful in her way of all, to his hostess of the present hour, into whose head it had so inevitably come to keep Charlotte on, for particular reasons, and who had asked in this benevolent spirit why in the world, if not obliged, with out plausibility, to hurry, her husband's son-in-law shouldn't wait over in her company. He would at least see, Lady Castledean had said, that nothing dreadful should happen to her either while still there or during the exposure of the run to town; and, for that matter, if they exceeded a little their licence it would positively help them to have done so together. Each of them would in this way have the other comfortably to complain of at home. All of which, besides, in Lady Castledean as in Maggie, in Fanny Assingham as in Charlotte herself, was working for him without provocation or pressure, by the mere play of some vague sense on their part—definite and conscious at the most only in Charlotte—that he wasn't, as a nature, as a character, as a gentleman, in fine, below his remarkable fortune.

But there were more things before him than even these; things that melted together, almost indistinguishably, to feed his sense of beauty. If the outlook was in every way spacious—and the towers of three cathedrals, in different counties, as had been pointed out to him, gleamed discernibly, like dim silver, in the rich sameness of tone—didn't he somehow the more feel it so because, precisely, Lady Castledean 351