Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/32

THE GOLDEN BOWL "What he would," what he really would—only that quantity itself escaped perhaps, in the brightness of the high harmony, familiar naming and discussing. It was enough of a recognition for her that, whatever the thing he might desire, he would always absolutely bring it off. She knew at this moment without a question, with the fullest surrender, how he had brought off in her, by scarce more than a single allusion, a perfect flutter of tenderness. If he had come back tired, tired from his long day, the exertion had been literally in her service and her father's. They two had sat at home in peace, the Principino between them, the complications of life kept down, the bores sifted out, the large ease of the home preserved, because of the way the others held the field and braved the weather. Amerigo never complained—any more than for that matter Charlotte did; but she seemed to see to-night as she had never yet quite done that their business of social representation, conceived as they conceived it, beyond any conception of her own and conscientiously carried out, was an affair of living always in harness. She remembered Fanny Assingham's old judgement, that friend's description of her father and herself as not living at all, as not knowing what to do or what might be done for them; and there came back to her with it an echo of the long talk they had had together, one September day at Fawns, under the trees, when she put before him this dictum of Fanny's.

That occasion might have counted for them—she had already often made the reflexion—as the first step in an existence more intelligently arranged. It 22