Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/166

THE GOLDEN BOWL in him," she said with bright fixed eyes; "I felt it in the streets as I walked along, and it was as if that helped me and lifted me up, my being off by myself there, not having for the moment to wonder and watch; having on the contrary almost nothing on my mind."

It was so much as if everything would come out right that she had fallen to thinking of her father's birthday, had given herself this as a reason for trying what she could pick up for it. They would keep it at Fawns, where they had kept it before—since it would be the twenty-first of the month; and she mightn't have another chance of making sure of something to offer him. There was always of course the impossibility of finding him anything, the least bit "good," that he wouldn't already long ago in his rummagings have seen himself—and only not to think a quarter good enough; this however was an old story, and one couldn't have had any fun with him but for his sweet theory that the individual gift, the friendship's offering, was by a rigorous law of nature a foredoomed aberration, and that the more it was so the more it showed, and the more one cherished it for showing, how friendly it had been. The infirmity of art was the candour of affection, the grossness of pedigree the refinement of sympathy; the ugliest objects in fact as a general thing were the bravest, the tenderest mementoes, and, as such, figured in glass cases apart, worthy doubtless of the home but not worthy of the temple—dedicated to the grimacing, not to the clear-faced gods. She herself, naturally, through the past years, had come to 156