Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/154

THE GOLDEN BOWL lace-flounced parasol now folded and now shouldered, march to and fro against a gold-coloured east or west? Maggie had truly gone far for a view of the question of this particular reaction, and she wasn't incapable of pulling herself up with the rebuke that she counted her chickens before they were hatched. How sure she should have to be of so many things before she might thus find a weariness in Amerigo's expression and a logic in his weariness!

One of her dissimulated arts for meeting their tension meanwhile was to interweave Mrs. Assingham as plausibly as possible with the parts and parcels of their surface, to bring it about that she should join them of an afternoon when they drove together or if they went to look at things—looking at things being almost as much a feature of their life as if they were bazaar-opening royalties. Then there were such combinations, later in the day, as her attendance on them, and the Colonel's as well, for such whimsical matters as visits to the opera no matter who was singing and sudden outbreaks of curiosity about the British drama. The good couple from Cadogan Place could always unprotestingly dine with them and "go on" afterwards to such publicities as the Princess cultivated the boldness of now perversely preferring. It may be said of her that during these passages she plucked her sensations by the way, detached nervously the small wild blossoms of her dim forest, so that she could smile over them at least with the spacious appearance, for her companions, for her husband above all, of bravely, of altogether frivolously, going a-maying. She had her intense, her 144