Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/333

THE PRINCESS every eye on her possible, her impossible defection. She must keep it up to the last, mustn't absent herself, for three minutes from her post: only on those lines assuredly would she show herself as with him and not against him.

It was extraordinary how scant a series of signs she had invited him to make of being, of truly having been at any time, "with" his wife: that reflexion she was not exempt from as they now, in their suspense, supremely waited—a reflexion under the brush of which she recognised her having had, in respect to him as well, to "do all," to go the whole way over, to move indefatigably while he stood as fixed in his place as some statue of one of his forefathers. The meaning of it would seem to be, she reasoned in sequestered hours, that he had a place, and that this was an attribute somehow indefeasible, unquenchable, which laid upon others—from the moment they definitely wanted anything of him—the necessity of taking more of the steps than he could, of circling round him, of remembering for his benefit the famous relation of the mountain to Mahomet. It was strange, if one had gone into it, but such a place as Amerigo's was like something made for him beforehand by innumerable facts, facts largely of the sort known as historical, made by ancestors, examples, traditions, habits; while Maggie's own had come to show simply as that improvised "post"—a post of the kind spoken of as advanced—with which she was to have found herself connected in the fashion of a settler or a trader in a new country; in the likeness even of some Indian squaw with a papoose on her back and barbarous 323