Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/90

THE GOLDEN BOWL was nothing the matter with her. She of a sudden saw everything she might say or do in the light of that undertaking, established connexions from it with any number of remote matters, struck herself for instance as acting all in its interest when she proposed their going out, in the exercise of their freedom and in homage to the season, for a turn in the Regent's Park. This resort was close at hand, at the top of Portland Place, and the Principino, beautifully better, had already proceeded there under high attendance: all of which considerations were defensive for Maggie, all of which became to her mind part of the business of cultivating continuity.

Upstairs, while she left him to put on something to go out in, the thought of his waiting below for her, in possession of the empty house, brought with it, sharply if briefly, one of her abrupt arrests of consistency, the brush of a vain imagination almost paralysing her often for the minute before her glass—the vivid look, in other words, of the particular difference his marriage had made. The particular difference seemed at such instants the loss, more than anything else, of their old freedom, their never having had to think, where they were together concerned, of any one, of anything but each other. It hadn't been her marriage that did it; that had never, for three seconds, suggested to either of them that they must act diplomatically, must reckon with another presence—no, not even with her husband's. She groaned to herself while the vain imagination lasted, "Why did he marry? ah why did he?" and then it came up to her more than ever that nothing could have been more 80