Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/219

THE PRINCESS to be said, to no betrayal of such wavering; so that from the moment of her alighting at the door with the Colonel everything went on between them at concert pitch. What had she done that last evening in Maggie's room but bring the husband and wife more together than, as would seem, they had ever been? Therefore what indiscretion shouldn't she show by attempting to go behind the grand appearance of her success?—which would be to court a doubt of her beneficent work. She knew accordingly nothing but harmony, she diffused restlessly nothing but peace—an extravagant expressive aggressive peace, not incongruous after all with the solid calm of the place; a kind of helmeted trident-shaking pax Britannica.

The peace, it must be added, had become, as the days elapsed, a peace quite generally animated and peopled—thanks to that fact of the presence of "company" in which Maggie's ability to preserve an appearance had learned from so far back to find its best resource. It wasn't inconspicuous, it was in fact striking, that this resource just now seemed to meet in the highest degree every one's need: quite as if every one were, by the multiplication of human objects in the scene, by the creation, by the confusion of fictive issues, hopeful of escaping somebody else's notice. It had reached the point in truth that the collective bosom might have been taken to heave with the knowledge of the descent upon adjacent shores, for a short period, of Mrs. Rance and the Lutches, still united, and still so divided, for conquest: the sense of the party showed at least, oddly 209