Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/66

THE GOLDEN BOWL embrace by his single arm, the infinite pressure of her whole person to his own, that such opportunities had so often suggested and prescribed. Held accordingly and, as she could but too intimately feel, exquisitely solicited, she had said the thing she was intending and desiring to say and as to which she felt, even more than she felt anything else, that whatever he might do she mustn't be irresponsible. Yes, she was in his exerted grasp, and she knew what that was; but she was at the same time in the grasp of her conceived responsibility, and the extraordinary thing was that of the two intensities the second was presently to become the sharper. He took his time for it meanwhile, but he met her speech after a fashion. "The cause of your father's deciding not to go?"

"Yes, and of my having wanted to let it act for him quietly—I mean without my insistence." She had, in her compressed state, another pause, and it made her feel as if she were immensely resisting. Strange enough was this sense for her, and altogether new, the sense of possessing, by miraculous help, some advantage that, absolutely then and there, in the carriage, as they rolled, she might either give up or keep. Strange, inexpressibly strange—so distinctly she saw that if she did give it up she should somehow give up everything for ever. And what her husband's grasp really meant, as her very bones registered, was that she should give it up: it was exactly for this that he had resorted to unfailing magic. He knew how to resort to it—he could be on occasion, as she had lately more than ever learned, so munificent a lover: all of which was precisely a part 56