Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/266

THE GOLDEN BOWL golden air that toward six o'clock of a July afternoon hung about the massed Kentish woods, several features of the social evolution of her old playmates, still beckoned on, it would seem, by unattainable ideals, still falling back, beyond the sea, to their native seats, for renewals of the moral, financial, conversational—one scarce knew what to call it—outfit, and again and for ever reappearing like a tribe of Wandering Jewesses. Our couple had finally exhausted however the study of these annals—not to say animals—and Maggie was to take up after a drop a different matter, or one at least with which the immediate connexion was not at first apparent.

"Were you amused at me just now—when I wondered what other people could wish to struggle for? Did you think me," she asked with some earnestness—"well, fatuous?"

"'Fatuous'?"—he seemed at a loss.

"I mean sublime in our happiness—as if looking down from a height. Or rather sublime in our general position—that's what I mean." She spoke as from the habit of her anxious conscience—something that disposed her frequently to assure herself for her human commerce of the state of the "books" of the spirit. "Because I don't at all want," she explained, "to be blinded or made 'sniffy' by any sense of a social situation." Her father listened to this declaration as if the precautions of her general mercy could still, as they betrayed themselves, have surprises for him—to say nothing of a charm of delicacy and beauty; he might have been wishing to see how far she could go and where she would, all touchingly 256