Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/296

THE GOLDEN BOWL were unknown. He had ever of course had his way of walking about to review his possessions and verify their condition; but this was a pastime to which he now struck her as almost extravagantly addicted, and when she passed near him and he turned to give her a smile she caught—or so she fancied—the greater depth of his small perpetual hum of contemplation. It was as if he were singing to himself, sotto voce, as he went—and it was also on occasion quite ineffably as if Charlotte, hovering, watching, listening for her part too, kept sufficiently within earshot to make it out as song, and yet by some effect of the very manner of it stood off and didn't dare.

One of the attentions she had from immediately after her marriage most freely paid him was that of her interest in his rarities, her appreciation of his taste, her native passion for beautiful objects and her grateful desire not to miss anything he could teach her about them. Maggie had in due course seen her begin to "work" this fortunately natural source of sympathy for all it was worth. She took possession of the ground throughout its extent; she abounded, to odd excess, one might have remarked, in the assumption of its being for her, with her husband, all the ground, the finest clearest air and most breatheable medium common to them. It had been given to Maggie to wonder if she didn't in these intensities of approbation too much shut him up to his province; but this was a complaint he had never made his daughter, and Charlotte must at least have had for her that, thanks to her admirable instinct, her range of perception marching with his own and never falling behind, she 286