Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/295

THE PRINCESS occasions of receiving from him the hint that he measured the impression he produced. It was not really till after their recent long talk in the park that she knew how deeply, how quite exhaustively, they had then communicated—so that they were to remain together, for the time, in consequence, quite in the form of a couple of sociable drinkers who sit back from the table over which they have been resting their elbows, over which they have emptied to the last drop their respective charged cups. The cups were still there on the table, but turned upside down; and nothing was left for the companions but to confirm by placid silences the fact that the wine had been good. They had parted positively as if on either side primed with it—primed for whatever was to be; and everything between them, as the month waned, added its touch of truth to this similitude. Nothing truly was at present between them save that they were looking at each other in infinite trust; it fairly wanted no more words, and when they met during the deep summer days, met even without witnesses, when they kissed at morning and evening or on any of the other occasions of contact that they had always so freely celebrated, a pair of birds of the upper air could scarce have appeared less to invite each other to sit down and worry afresh. So it was that in the house itself, where more of his waiting treasures than ever were provisionally ranged, she sometimes only looked at him—from end to end of the great gallery, the pride of the house, for instance—as if, in one of the halls of a museum, she had been an earnest young woman with a Baedeker and he a vague gentleman to whom even Baedekers 285