Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/44

THE GOLDEN BOWL was that she wasn't ready with a reason—not, that is, with what she would have called a reasonable one. She thought of herself, instinctively, beautifully, as having dealt, all her life, at her father's side and by his example, only in reasonable reasons; and what she would really have been most ashamed of would be to produce for him, in this line, some inferior substitute. Unless she were in a position to plead definitely that she was jealous she should be in no position to plead decently that she was dissatisfied. This latter condition would be a necessary implication of the former; without the former behind it it would have to fall to the ground. So had the case wonderfully been arranged for her; there was a card she could play, but there was only one, and to play it would be to end the game. She felt herself—as at the small square green table between the tall old silver candlesticks and the neatly arranged counters—her father's playmate and partner; and what it constantly came back to in her mind was that for her to ask a question, to raise a doubt, to reflect in any degree on the play of the others, would be to break the charm. The charm she had to call it, since it kept her companion so constantly engaged, so perpetually seated and so contentedly occupied. To say anything at all would be in fine to have to say why she was jealous; and she could in her private hours but stare long, with suffused eyes, at that impossibility.

By the end of a week, the week that had begun especially with her morning hour in Eaton Square between her father and his wife, her consciousness of being beautifully treated had become again verily 34