Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/395

THE PRINCE of the desert camping at the foot of that monument, went by way of reconnoissance into the drawing-room. He visited according to his wont the windows and their fastenings; he cast round the place the eye all at once of the master and the manager, the commandant and the rate-payer; then he came back to his wife, before whom for a moment he stood waiting. But she herself continued for a time to wait, only looking up at him inscrutably. There was in these minor manœuvres and conscious patiences something of a suspension of their old custom of divergent discussion, that intercourse by misunderstanding which had grown so clumsy now. This familiar pleasantry seemed to desire to show it could yield on occasion to any clear trouble; though it was also sensibly and just incoherently in the air that no trouble was at present to be vulgarly recognised as clear.

There might, for that matter, even have been in Mrs. Assingham's face a mild perception of some finer sense—a sense for his wife's situation, and the very situation she was, oddly enough, about to repudiate—that she had fairly caused to grow in him. But it was a flower to breathe upon gently, and this was very much what she finally did. She knew he needed no telling that she had given herself all the afternoon to her friends in Eaton Square, and that her doing so would have been but the prompt result of impressions gathered, in quantities, in brimming baskets, like the purple grapes of the vintage, at Matcham; a process surrounded by him, while it so unmistakeably went on, with abstentions and 365