Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/263

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father had asked her three days later and in an interval of calm how she was affected, in the light of their reappearance and of their now perhaps richer fruition, by Dotty and Kitty and by the once formidable Mrs. Rance; and the consequence of this enquiry had been for the pair just such another stroll together away from the rest of the party and off into the park as had asserted its need to them on the occasion of the previous visit of these anciently more agitating friends—that of their long talk on a sequestered bench beneath one of the great trees, when the particular question had come up for them the then purblind discussion of which at their enjoyed leisure Maggie had formed the habit of regarding as the "first beginning" of their present situation. The whirligig of time had thus brought round for them again, on their finding themselves face to face while the others were gathering for tea on the terrace, the same odd impulse quietly to "slope"—so Adam Verver himself, as they went, familiarly expressed it—that had acted in its way of old; acted for the distant autumn afternoon and for the sharpness of their since so outlived crisis. It might have been funny to them now that the presence of Mrs. Rance and the Lutches—and with symptoms too at that time less developed—had once for their anxiety and their prudence 253