Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/307

THE PRINCESS their ease, would certainly rather have been prescribed; but our young woman had perhaps not yet felt it so fully brought home that such refinements of repose among them constituted the empty chair at the feast. This was the more distinct as the feast, literally, in the great bedimmed dining-room, the cool ceremonious semblance of luncheon, had just been taking place without Mrs. Verver. She had figured but as the absent victim of a bad headache, not reported to the rest of the company by her husband, but named directly to Mr. Verver himself, on their having assembled, by her maid, deputed for the effect and conscientiously producing it.

Maggie had sat down with the others to viands artfully iced, to the slow circulation of precious tinkling jugs, to marked reserves of reference in many directions—poor Fanny Assingham herself scarce thrusting her nose out of the padded hollow into which she had withdrawn. A consensus of languor, which might almost have been taken for a community of dread, ruled the scene—relieved only by the fitful experiments of Father Mitchell, good holy hungry man, a trusted and overworked London friend and adviser, who had taken for a week or two the light neighbouring service, local rites flourishing under Maggie's munificence, and was enjoying, as a convenience, all the bounties of the house. He conversed undiscouraged, Father Mitchell—conversed mainly with the indefinite wandering smile of the entertainers, and the Princess's power to feel him on the whole a blessing for these occasions was not impaired by what was awkward in her consciousness of having, 297