Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/348

THE GOLDEN BOWL knew, with a maintained idea—of which she had never spoken to him; but what had at last happened was that his way of looking at her on occasion seemed a perception of the presence not of one idea but of fifty, variously prepared for uses with which he somehow must reckon. She knew herself suddenly, almost strangely glad to be coming to him at this hour with nothing more abstract than a telegram; but even after she had stepped into his prison under her pretext, while her eyes took in his face and then embraced the four walls that enclosed his restlessness, she recognised the virtual identity of his condition with that aspect of Charlotte's situation for which, early in the summer and in all the amplitude of a great residence, she had found with so little seeking the similitude of the locked cage. He struck her as caged, the man who couldn't now without an instant effect on her sensibility give an instinctive push to the door she hadn't completely closed behind her. He had been turning twenty ways, for impatiences all his own, and when she was once shut in with him it was yet again as if she had come to him in his more than monastic cell to offer him light or food. There was a difference none the less between his captivity and Charlotte's—the difference, as it might be, of his lurking there by his own act and his own choice; the admission of which had indeed virtually been in his starting at her entrance as if even this were in its degree an interference. That was what betrayed for her practically his fear of her fifty ideas, and what had begun after a minute to make her wish to repudiate or explain. It was more wonderful than she could have told; it was 338