Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/229

THE PRINCESS in a position to boast of touching bottom. Maggie inwardly lived in a consciousness that she could but partly open even to so good a friend and her own visitation of the fuller expanse of which was for that matter still going on. They had been duskier still, however, these recesses of her imagination—that, no doubt, was what might at present be said for them. She had looked into them on the eve of her leaving town almost without penetration: she had made out in those hours, and also of a truth during the days which immediately followed, little more than the strangeness of a relation having for its chief mark—whether to be prolonged or not—the absence of any "intimate" result of the crisis she had invited her husband to recognise. They had dealt with this crisis again face to face, very briefly, the morning after the scene in her room—but with the odd consequence of her having appeared merely to leave it on his hands. He had received it from her as he might have received a bunch of keys or a list of commissions—attentive to her instructions about them, but only putting them for the time very carefully and safely into his pocket. The instructions had seemed from day to day to make so little difference for his behaviour—that is for his speech or his silence; to produce as yet so little of the fruit of action. He had taken from her on the spot in a word, before going to dress for dinner, all she then had to give—after which, on the morrow, he had asked her for more, a good deal as if she might have renewed her supply during the night; but he had had at his command for this latter purpose an air of extraordinary detachment and discretion, an air amounting really 219