Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/148

THE GOLDEN BOWL, so changed—it was the new terms of her problem that would tax Charlotte's art. The Princess could pull herself up repeatedly by remembering that the real "relation" between her father and his wife was a thing she knew nothing about and that in strictness was not of her concern; but she none the less failed to keep quiet, as she would have called it, before the projected image of their ostensibly happy isolation. Nothing could have had less of the quality of quietude than a certain queer wish that fitfully flickered up in her, a wish that usurped perversely the place of a much more natural one. If Charlotte, while she was about it, could only have been worse!—that idea Maggie fell to invoking instead of the idea that she might desirably have been better. For, exceedingly odd as it was to feel in such ways, she believed she mightn't have worried so much if she didn't somehow make her stepmother out, under the beautiful trees and among the dear old gardens, as lavish of fifty kinds of confidence and twenty kinds, at least, of gentleness. Gentleness and confidence were certainly the right thing as from a charming woman to her husband, but the fine tissue of reassurance woven by this lady's hands and flung over her companion as a light muffling veil, formed precisely a wrought transparency through which she felt her father's eyes continually rest on herself. The reach of his gaze came to her straighter from a distance; it showed him as still more conscious, down there alone, of the suspected, the felt elaboration of the process of their not alarming nor hurting him. She had herself now, for weeks and weeks, and all 138