Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/89

THE PRINCESS horror of!—say to her, then would be time enough for Amerigo and Charlotte to confess to not liking to appear to foregather.

She had this morning a wonderful consciousness both of dreading a particular question from him and of being able to check, yes even to disconcert magnificently by her apparent manner of receiving it, any restless imagination he might have about its importance. The day, bright and soft, had the breath of summer; it made them talk, to begin with, of Fawns, of the way Fawns invited—Maggie aware the while that in thus regarding with him the sweetness of its invitation to one couple just as much as to another her humbugging smile grew very nearly convulsive. That was it, and there was truly relief of a sort in taking it in: she was humbugging him already, by absolute necessity, as she had never never done in her life—doing it up to the full height of what she had allowed for. The necessity, in the great dimly-shining room where, declining for his reasons to sit down, he moved about in Amerigo's very footsteps, the necessity affected her as pressing upon her with the very force of the charm itself; of the old pleasantness between them so candidly playing up there again; of the positive flatness of their tenderness, a surface all for familiar use, quite as if generalised from the long succession of tapestried sofas, sweetly faded, on which his theory of contentment had sat, through unmeasured pauses, beside her own. She knew from this instant, knew in advance and as well as anything would ever teach her, that she must never intermit for a solitary second her so highly undertaking to prove there 79