Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/290

THE GOLDEN BOWL had been an act of conformity exquisitely calculated, her imagination yet sought in the hidden play of his influence the explanation of any change of surface, any difference of expression or intention. There had been, through life, as we know, few quarters in which the Princess's fancy could let itself loose; but it shook off restraint when it plunged into the figured void of the detail of that relation. This was a realm it could people with images—again and again with fresh ones; they swarmed there like the strange combinations that lurked in the woods at twilight; they loomed into the definite and faded into the vague, their main present sign for her being however that they were always, that they were duskily, agitated. Her earlier vision of a state of bliss made insecure by the very intensity of the bliss—this had dropped from her; she had ceased to see, as she lost herself, the pair of operatic, of high Wagnerian lovers (she found deep within her these comparisons) interlocked in their wood of enchantment, a green glade as romantic as one's dream of an old German forest. The picture was veiled on the contrary with the dimness of trouble; behind which she felt indistinguishable the procession of forms that had lost all so pitifully their precious confidence. Therefore though there was in these days for her with Amerigo little enough even of the imitation, from day,to day, of unembarrassed reference—as she had foreseen for that matter from the first that there would be—her active conception of his accessibility to their companion's own private and unextinguished right to break ground was not much less active than before. So it was that her inner sense, in spite of 280