Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/152

THE GOLDEN BOWL with her father, of the prescribed reach of her hypocrisy, she saw how it would have to stretch even to her seeking to prove that she was not, all the same, important. A single touch from him—oh she should know it in case of its coming!—any brush of his hand, of his lips, of his voice, inspired by recognition of her probable interest as distinct from pity for her virtual gloom, would hand her over to him bound hand and foot. Therefore to be free, to be free to act other than abjectly for her father, she must conceal from him the validity that, like a microscopic insect pushing a grain of sand, she was taking on even for herself. She could keep it up with a change in sight, but she couldn't keep it up for ever; so that one extraordinary effect of their week of untempered confrontation, which bristled with new marks, was to make her reach out in thought to their customary companions and calculate the kind of relief that rejoining them would bring. She was learning almost from minute to minute to be a mistress of shades—since always when there were possibilities enough of intimacy there were also by that fact, in intercourse, possibilities of iridescence; but she was working against an adversary who was a master of shades too and on whom if she didn't look out she should presently have imposed a consciousness of the nature of their struggle. To feel him in fact, to think of his feeling himself, her adversary in things of this fineness—to see him at all in short brave a name that would represent him as in opposition—was already to be nearly reduced to a visible smothering of her cry of alarm. Should he guess they were having in 142