Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/273

THE PRINCESS For a minute she failed to speak, but at last she answered: "It wasn't to talk about that. I do feel however beyond everything—and as a consequence of that, I dare say," she added with a turn to gaiety, "seem often not to know quite where I am."

The mere fine pulse of passion in it, the suggestion as of a creature consciously floating and shining in a warm summer sea, some element of dazzling sapphire and silver, a creature cradled upon depths, buoyant among dangers, in which fear or folly or sinking otherwise than in play was impossible—something of all this might have been making once more present to him, with his discreet, his half-shy assent to it, her probable enjoyment of a rapture that he in his day had presumably convinced no great number of persons either of his giving or of his receiving. He sat a while as if he knew himself hushed, almost admonished, and not for the first time; yet it was an effect that might have brought before him rather what she had gained than what he had missed. Besides, who but himself really knew what he, after all, hadn't, or even had, gained? The beauty of her condition was keeping him at any rate, as he might feel, in sight of the sea, where, though his personal dips were over, the whole thing could shine at him and the air and the plash and the play become for him too a sensation. That couldn't be fixed upon him as missing; since if it wasn't personally floating, if it wasn't even sitting in the sand, it could yet pass very well for breathing the bliss, in a communicated irresistible way—for tasting the balm. It could pass further for knowing—for knowing that without 263