Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 2.djvu/92

THE GOLDEN BOWL approach to irritation, told her maid, a new woman whom she had lately found herself thinking of as abysmal, that she didn't want her—she tried to focus the possibility of some understanding between them in consequence of which he should cut loose.

Very near indeed it looked, any such possibility!—that consciousness too had taken its turn by the time she was ready; all the vibration, all the emotion of this present passage being precisely in the very sweetness of their lapse back into the conditions of the simpler time, into a queer resemblance between the aspect and the feeling of the moment and those of numberless other moments that were sufficiently far away. She had been quick in her preparation, in spite of the flow of the tide that sometimes took away her breath; but a pause once more was still left for her to make, a pause, at the top of the stairs, before she came down to him, in the span of which she asked herself if it weren't thinkable, from the perfectly practical point of view, that she should simply sacrifice him. She didn't go into the detail of what sacrificing him would mean—she didn't need to; so distinct was it, in one of her restless lights, that there he was awaiting her, that she should find him walking up and down the drawing-room in the warm fragrant air to which the open windows and the abundant flowers contributed; slowly and vaguely moving there and looking very slight and young and superficially manageable, almost as much like her child, putting it a little freely, as like her parent; with the appearance about him above all of having perhaps arrived just on purpose to say it to her himself in so many words: "Sacrifice 82