Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/149

THE PRINCESS, traced the extension of this pious effort; but her perfect success in giving no sign—she did herself that credit—would have been an achievement quite wasted if Mrs. Verver should make with him those mistakes of proportion, one set of them too abruptly, too incoherently designed to correct another set, that she had made with his daughter. However, if she had been worse, poor woman, who should say that her husband would to a certainty have been better?

One groped noiselessly among such questions, and it was actually not even definite for the Princess that her own Amerigo, left alone with her in town, had arrived at the golden mean of non-precautionary gallantry which would tend by his calculation to brush private criticism from its last perching-place. The truth was, in this connexion, that she had different sorts of terrors, and there were hours when it came to her that these days were a prolonged repetition of that night-drive, of weeks before, from the other house to their own, when he had tried to charm her by his sovereign personal power into some collapse that would commit her to a repudiation of consistency. She was never alone with him, it was to be said, without her having sooner or later to ask herself what had already become of her consistency; yet at the same time so long as she breathed no charge she kept hold of a remnant of appearance that could save her from attack. Attack, real attack from him as he would conduct it, was what she above all dreaded; she was so far from sure that under that experience she mightn't drop into some depth of 139