Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/310

THE GOLDEN BOWL no more means for a fire. She might, with such nerves, have supposed almost anything of any one; anything almost of poor Bob Assingham, condemned to eternal observances and solemnly appreciating her father's wine; anything verily, yes, of the good priest as he finally sat back with fat folded hands and twiddled his thumbs on his stomach. The good priest looked hard at the decanters, at the different dishes of dessert—he eyed them half-obliquely, as if they might have met him to-day for conversation better than any one present. But the Princess had her fancy at last about that too; she was in the midst of a passage, before she knew it, between Father Mitchell and Charlotte—some approach he would have attempted with her that very morning perhaps to the circumstance of an apparent detachment recently noted in her from any practice of devotion. He would have drawn from this, say, his artless inference—taken it for a sign of some smothered inward trouble and naturally pointed the moral that the way out of such straits was not through neglect of the grand remedy. He had possibly prescribed contrition—he had at any rate quickened in her the beat of that false repose to which our young woman's own act had devoted her at her all so deluded instance. The falsity of it had laid traps compared to which the imputation of treachery even accepted might have seemed a path of roses. The acceptance, strangely, would have left her nothing to do—she could have remained, had she liked, all insolently passive; whereas the failure to proceed against her, as it might have been called, left her everything, all the more that it was wrapped so in 300