Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/108

THE GOLDEN BOWL was. His recognition of the new terms as different from the old, what was that practically but a confession that something had happened, and a perception that, interested in the situation she had helped to create, Mrs. Assingham would be by so much as this concerned in its inevitable development? It amounted to an intimation, off his guard, that he should be thankful for some one to turn to. If she had wished covertly to sound him he had now in short quite given himself away, and if she had even at the start needed anything more to settle her here assuredly was enough. He had hold of his small grandchild as they retraced their steps, swinging the boy's hand and not bored, as he never was, by his always bristling, like a fat little porcupine, with shrill interrogation-points—so that, secretly, while they went, she had wondered again if the equilibrium mightn't have been more real, mightn't above all have demanded less strange a study, had it only been on the books that Charlotte should give him a Principino of his own. She had repossessed herself now of his other arm, only this time she was drawing him back, gently, helplessly back to what they had tried for the hour to get away from—just as he was consciously drawing the child and as high Miss Bogle on her left, representing the duties of home, was complacently drawing her. The duties of home, when the house in Portland Place reappeared, showed even from a distance as vividly there before them. Amerigo and Charlotte had come in—that is Amerigo had, Charlotte rather having come out,—and the pair were perched together in the balcony, he bareheaded, she divested of her jacket, her mantle 98