Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/351

THE PRINCESS Fanny and the Colonel. They don't want them at tea, she quite sufficiently expresses; they polish them off, poor dears, they get rid of them beforehand. They want only us together; and if they cut us down to tea," she continued, "as they cut Fanny and the Colonel down to luncheon, perhaps it's after all for the fancy of their keeping their last night in London for each other."

She said these things as they came to her; she was unable to keep them back even though as she heard herself she might have been throwing everything to the winds. But wasn't that the right way—for sharing his last day of captivity with the man one adored? (It was every moment more and more for her as if she were waiting with him in his prison—waiting with some gleam of remembrance of how noble captives in the French Revolution, in the darkness of the Terror, used to make a feast or a high discourse of their last poor resources. If she had broken with everything now, every observance of all the past months, she must simply then take it so—take it that what she had worked for was too near at last to let her keep her head. She might have been losing her head verily in her husband's eyes—since he didn't know all the while that the sudden freedom of her words was but the diverted intensity of her disposition personally to seize him. He knew as little that this was her manner—now she was with him—of beguiling audaciously the supremacy of suspense. For the people of the French Revolution assuredly there wasn't suspense; the scaffold, for those she was thinking of, was certain—whereas what Charlotte's telegram 341