Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/82

THE GOLDEN BOWL caused Mrs. Assingham fairly to flush with responsive joy; she glittered at her young friend from moment to moment quite feverishly; it was positively as if her young friend had in some marvellous sudden supersubtle way become a source of succour to herself, become beautifully divinely retributive. The intensity of the taste of these registered phenomena was in fact that somehow, by a process and through a connexion not again to be traced, she so practised at the same time on Amerigo and Charlotte—with only the drawback, her constant check and second-thought, that she concomitantly practised perhaps still more on her father.

This last was a danger indeed that for much of the ensuing time had its hours of strange beguilement—those at which her sense for precautions so suffered itself to lapse that she felt her communion with him more intimate than any other. It couldn't but pass between them that something singular was happening—so much as this she again and again said to herself; whereby the comfort of it was there after all to be noted just as much as the possible peril, and she could think of the couple they formed together as groping, with sealed lips but with mutual looks that had never been so tender, for some freedom, some fiction, some figured bravery, under which they might safely talk of it. The moment was to come—and it finally came with an effect as penetrating as the sound that follows the pressure of an electric button—when she read the least helpful of meanings into the agitation she had created. The merely specious description of their case would have been that, after being for a long time, as 72