Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/371

THE PRINCESS of Madame Tussaud. "I'm so glad—for your last look."

With which, after Maggie—quite in the air—had said it, the note was struck indeed; the note of that strange accepted finality of relation, as from couple to couple, which almost escaped an awkwardness only by not attempting a gloss. Yes, this was the wonder, that the occasion defied insistence precisely because of the vast quantities with which it dealt—so that separation was on a scale beyond any compass of parting. To do such an hour justice would have been in some degree to question its grounds—which was why they remained in fine, the four of them, in the upper air, united through the firmest abstention from pressure. There was visibly no point at which, face to face, either Amerigo or Charlotte had pressed; and how little she herself was in danger of doing so Maggie scarce needed to remember. That her father wouldn't by the tip of a toe—of that she was equally conscious: the only thing was that since he didn't she could but hold her breath for what he would do instead. When at the end of three minutes more he had said, with an effect of suddenness, "Well, Mag—and the Principino?" it was quite as if that were by contrast the hard, the truer voice.

She glanced at the clock. "I 'ordered' him for half-past five—which hasn't yet struck. Trust him, my dear, not to fail you!"

"Oh I don't want him to fail me!" was Mr. Verver's reply; yet uttered in so explicitly jocose a relation to the possibilities of failure that even when just afterwards he wandered in his impatience to one 361