Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/416

THE GOLDEN BOWL for final patience, and he seemed vaguely to "time" her as she moved to and fro. He had at the same time to do justice to the lucidity she had at last attained, and it was doubtless by way of expression of this teachability that he let his eyes roll, for a minute, as from the force of feeling, over the upper dusk of the room. He had thought of the response his wife's words ideally implied. "Decide to live—ah yes!—for her child."

"Oh bother her child!"—and he had never felt so snubbed, for an exemplary view, as when Fanny now stopped short. "To live, you poor dear, for her father—which is another pair of sleeves!" And Mrs. Assingham's whole ample ornamented person irradiated, with this, the truth that had begun, under so much handling, to glow. "Any idiot can do things for her child. She'll have a motive more original, and we shall see how it will work her. She'll have to save him."

"To 'save' him—?"

"To keep her father from her own knowledge. That"—and she seemed to see it, before her, in her husband's very eyes—"will be work cut out!" With which, as at the highest conceivable climax, she wound up their colloquy. "Good-night!"

There was something in her manner, however—or in the effect at least of this supreme demonstration—that had fairly, and by a single touch, lifted him to her side; so that, after she had turned her back to regain the landing and the staircase, he overtook her, before she had begun to mount, with the ring of excited perception. "Ah but, you know, that's rather jolly!" 386