Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/302

THE GOLDEN BOWL faith with which she was honoured. Maggie meanwhile at the window knew the strangest thing to be happening: she had turned suddenly to crying, or was at least on the point of it—the lighted square before her all blurred and dim. The high voice went on; its quaver was doubtless for conscious ears only, but there were verily thirty seconds during which it sounded, for our young woman, like the shriek of a soul in pain. Kept up a minute longer it would break and collapse—so that Maggie felt herself the next thing turn with a start to her father. "Can't she be stopped? Hasn't she done it enough?"—some such question as that she let herself ask him to suppose in her. Then it was that, across half the gallery—for he hadn't moved from where she had first seen him—he struck her as confessing, with strange tears in his own eyes, to sharp identity of emotion. "Poor thing, poor thing"—it reached straight—"isn't she, for one's credit, on the swagger?" After which, as held thus together they had still another strained minute, the shame, the pity, the better knowledge, the smothered protest, the divined anguish even, so overcame him that, blushing to his eyes, he turned short away. The affair but of a few muffled moments, this snatched communion yet lifted Maggie as on air—so much for deep guesses on her own side too it gave her to think of. There was honestly an awful mixture in things, and it wasn't closed to her aftersense of such passages—we have already indeed in other cases seen it open—that the deepest depth of all, in a perceived penalty, was that you couldn't be sure some of your compunctions and contortions wouldn't show for ridiculous. 292