Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/87

THE PRINCESS It would have translated itself on the spot for his ear into jealousy, and from reverberation to repercussion would have reached her father's exactly in the form of a cry piercing the stillness of peaceful sleep. It had been for many days almost as difficult for her to catch a quiet twenty minutes with her father as it had formerly been easy; there had been in fact of old—the time, so strangely, seemed already far away—an inevitability in her longer passages with him, a sort of domesticated beauty in the calculability round about them of everything. But at present Charlotte was almost always there when Amerigo brought her to Eaton Square, where Amerigo was constantly bringing her; and Amerigo was almost always there when Charlotte brought her husband to Portland Place, where Charlotte was constantly bringing him. The fractions of occasions, the chance minutes that put them face to face, had as yet of late contrived to count but little between them either for the sense of opportunity or for that of exposure, inasmuch as the lifelong rhythm of their intercourse made against all cursory handling of deep things. They had never availed themselves of any given quarter of an hour to gossip about fundamentals; they moved slowly through large still space; they could be silent together, at any time, beautifully, with much more comfort than hurriedly expressive. It appeared indeed to have become true that their common appeal measured itself for vividness just by this economy of sound; they might have been talking "at" each other when they talked with their companions, but these latter were assuredly not in any directer way to gain light on the current 77