Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/298

THE GOLDEN BOWL the chances to apply your ear there that I, as a husband, have, you would hear thump and thump and thump. She thinks it may be, her doom, the awful place over there—awful for her; but she's afraid to ask, don't you see? just as she's afraid of not asking; just as she's afraid of so many other things that she sees multiplied all about her now as perils and portents. She'll know, however—when she does know."

Charlotte's one opportunity meanwhile for the air of confidence she had formerly worn so well and that agreed so with her firm and charming type was the presence of visitors never, as the season advanced, wholly intermitted—rather in fact, so constant, with all the people who turned up for luncheon and for tea and to see the house, now replete, now famous, that Maggie grew to think again of this large element of "company" as of a kind of renewed water-supply for the tank in which, like a party of panting gold-fish, they kept afloat. It helped them unquestionably with each other, weakening the emphasis of so many of the silences of which their intimate intercourse would otherwise have consisted. Beautiful and wonderful for her even at times was the effect of these interventions—their effect above all in bringing home to each the possible heroism of perfunctory things. They learned fairly to live in the perfunctory; they remained in it as many hours of the day as might be; it took on finally the likeness of some spacious central chamber in a haunted house, a great overarched and overglazed rotunda where gaiety might reign, but the doors of which opened into sinister circular passages. 288