Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/52

THE GOLDEN BOWL as staring out at her in recovered identities of behaviour, expression and tone. They had a view of her situation, and of the possible forms her own consciousness of it might take—a view determined by the change of attitude they had had ever so subtly to recognise in her on their return from Matcham. They had had to read into this small and all-but-suppressed variation a mute comment—on they didn't quite know what; and it now arched over the Princess's head like a vault of bold span that important communication between them on the subject couldn't have failed of being immediate. This new perception bristled for her, as we have said, with odd intimations, but questions unanswered played in and out of it as well—the question for instance of why such promptitude of harmony should have been important. Ah when she began to recover piece by piece the process became lively; she might have been picking small shining diamonds out of the sweepings of her ordered house. She bent, in this pursuit, over her dust-bin; she challenged to the last grain the refuse of her innocent economy. Then it was that the dismissed vision of Amerigo that evening in arrest at the door of her salottino while her eyes, from her placed chair, took him in—then it was that this immense little memory gave out its full power. Since the question was of doors she had afterwards, she now saw, shut it out; she had responsibly shut in, as we have understood, shut in there with her sentient self, only the fact of his reappearance and the plenitude of his presence. These things had been testimony after all to supersede any other, for on the spot, even while she looked, 42