Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/321

THE PRINCESS revolvers. She could almost have smiled at last, troubled as she yet knew herself, to show how richly she was harmless; she held up her volume, which was so weak a weapon, and while she continued, for consideration, to keep her distance, explained with as quenched a quaver as possible. "I saw you come out—saw you from my window and couldn't bear to think you should find yourself here without the beginning of your book. This is the beginning; you've got the wrong volume and I've brought you out the right."

She remained after she had spoken; it was like holding a parley with a possible adversary, and her intense, her exalted little smile requested formal leave. "May I come nearer now?" she seemed to say—as to which however, the next minute, she saw Charlotte's reply lose itself in a strange process, a thing of several sharp stages, which she could stand there and trace. The dread, after this space, had dropped from her face; though she still discernibly enough couldn't believe in her having in so strange a fashion been deliberately made up to. If she had been made up to at least it was with an idea—the idea that had struck her at first as necessarily dangerous. That it wasn't, insistently wasn't, this shone from Maggie with a force finally not to be resisted; and on that perception, on the immense relief so constituted, everything had by the end of three minutes extraordinarily changed. Maggie had come out to her really because she knew her doomed, doomed to a separation that was like a knife in her heart; and in the very sight of her uncontrollable, her blinded 311