Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/150

THE GOLDEN BOWL weakness, mightn't show him some shortest way with her that he would know how to use again. Therefore since she had given him as yet no moment's pretext for pretending to her that she had either lost faith or suffered by a feather's weight in happiness, she left him, it was easy to reason, with an immense advantage for all waiting and all tension. She wished him for the present to "make up" to her for nothing. Who could say to what making-up might lead, into what consenting or pretending or destroying blindness it might plunge her? She loved him too helplessly still to dare to open the door by an inch to his treating her as if either of them had wronged the other. Something or somebody—and who, at this, which of them all?—would inevitably, would in the gust of momentary selfishness, be sacrificed to that; whereas what she intelligently needed was to know where she was going. Knowledge, knowledge, was a fascination as well as fear; and a part precisely of the strangeness of this juncture was the way her apprehension that he would break out to her with some merely general profession was mixed with her dire need to forgive him, to reassure him, to respond to him, on no ground that she didn't fully measure.) To do these things it must be clear to her what they were for; but to act in that light was by the same effect to learn horribly what the other things had been. He might tell her only what he wanted, only what would work upon her by the beauty of his appeal; and the result of the direct appeal of any beauty in him would be her helpless submission to his terms. All her temporary safety, 140