Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/48

THE GOLDEN BOWL to regard, and when her companion's inveteracy of never passing first, of not sitting till she was seated, of not interrupting till she appeared to give leave, of not forgetting too familiarly that in addition to being important she was also sensitive, had the effect of throwing over their intercourse a kind of silver tissue of decorum. It hung there above them like a canopy of state, a reminder that though the lady-in-waiting was an established favourite, safe in her position, a little queen, however good-natured, was always a little queen and might with small warning remember it.

And yet another of these concomitants of feverish success all the while was the perception that in another quarter too things were being made easy. Charlotte's alacrity in meeting her had in one sense operated slightly overmuch as an intervention: it had begun to reabsorb her at the very hour of her husband's showing her that to be all there, as the phrase was, he likewise only required—as one of the other phrases was too—the straight tip. She had heard him talk about the straight tip in his moods of amusement at English slang, in his remarkable displays of assimilative power, power worthy of better causes and higher inspirations; and he had taken it from her at need in a way that, certainly in the first glow of relief, had made her brief interval seem large. Then, however immediately, and even though superficially, there had declared itself a readjustment of relations to which she was, once more, practically a little sacrificed. "I must do everything," she had said, "without letting papa see what I do—at least till it's done!" but she scarce knew how she proposed even for the next few days to 38