Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/264

THE GOLDEN BOWL a crisis; it might have been funny that these ladies could ever have figured to their imagination as a symbol of dangers vivid enough to precipitate the need of a remedy. This amount of entertainment and assistance they were indeed disposed to extract from their actual impressions; they had been finding it for months past, by Maggie's view, a resource and a relief to talk, with an approach to intensity, when they met, of all the people they weren't really thinking of and didn't really care about, the people with whom their existence had begun almost to swarm; and they closed in at present round the spectres of their past, as they permitted themselves to describe the three ladies, with a better imitation of enjoying their theme than they had been able to achieve, certainly, during the stay for instance of the Castledeans. The Castledeans were a new joke comparatively, and they had had—always to Maggie's view—to teach themselves the way of it; whereas the Detroit, the Providence party, rebounding so from Providence, from Detroit, was an old and ample one, of which the most could be made and as to which a humorous insistence could be guarded.

Sharp and sudden moreover this afternoon had been their well-nigh confessed desire just to rest together a little as from some strain long felt but never named; to rest as who should say shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand, each pair of eyes so yearningly—and indeed what could it be but so wearily?—closed as to render the collapse safe from detection by the other pair. It was positively as if in short the inward felicity of their being once more, perhaps only 254