Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/275

THE PRINCESS fixedly, that he spoke, for the remaining importance of it, from the bench; where he leaned back, raising his face to her, his legs thrust out a trifle wearily and his hands grasping either side of the seat. They had beaten against the wind and she was still fresh; they had beaten against the wind and he, as at the best the more battered vessel, perhaps just vaguely drooped. But the effect of their silence was that she appeared to beckon him on, and he might have been fairly alongside of her when at the end of another minute he found their word. "The only thing is that as for ever putting up again with your pretending that you're selfish—!"

At this she helped him out with it. "You won't take it from me?"

"I won't take it from you."

"Well of course you won't, for that's your way. It doesn't matter and it only proves—! But it doesn't matter either what it proves. I'm at this very moment," she declared, "frozen stiff with selfishness."

He faced her a while longer in the same way; it was strangely as if, by this sudden arrest, by their having, in their acceptance of the unsaid, or at least their reference to it, practically given up pretending—it was as if they were "in" for it, for something they had been ineffably avoiding, but the dread of which was itself in a manner a seduction, just as any confession of the dread was by so much an allusion. Then she seemed to see him let himself go. "When a person's of the nature you speak of there are always other persons to suffer. But you've just been 265