Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/85

THE PRINCESS to have occasion to say to herself that a deeper treachery would perhaps lurk in recoveries and reassurances. She was to feel alone again, as she had felt at the issue of her high tension with her husband during their return from meeting the Castledeans in Eaton Square. The evening in question had left her with a larger alarm, but then a lull had come—the alarm after all was yet to be confirmed. There came an hour inevitably when she knew with a chill what she had feared and why; it had taken, this hour, a month to arrive, but to find it before her was thoroughly to recognise it, for it showed her sharply what Amerigo had meant in alluding to a particular use that they might make of Charlotte for their reaffirmed harmony and prosperity. The more she thought, at present, of the tone he had employed to express their enjoyment of this resource, the more it came back to her as the product of a conscious art of dealing with her. He had been conscious at the moment of many things—conscious even not a little of desiring and thereby of needing to see what she would do in a given case. The given case would be that of her being to a certain extent, as she might fairly make it out, menaced—horrible as it was to impute to him any intention represented by such a word. Why it was that to speak of making her stepmother intervene, as they might call it, in a question that seemed just then and there quite peculiarly their own business—why it was that a turn so familiar and so easy should at the worst strike her as charged with the spirit of a threat, was an oddity disconnected for her temporarily from its grounds, the adventure of an imagination within her 75