The Golden Bowl, vol 2 | Page 4

listened to any inward voice that spoke in a
new tone. Yet these instinctive postponements of reflection were the
fruit, positively, of recognitions and perceptions already active; of the
sense, above all, that she had made, at a particular hour, made by the
mere touch of her hand, a difference in the situation so long present to
her as practically unattackable. This situation had been occupying, for
months and months, the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had
reared itself there like some strange, tall tower of ivory, or perhaps

rather some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, a structure
plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned, at
the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled, ever so charmingly,
when stirred by chance airs. She had walked round and round it--that
was what she felt; she had carried on her existence in the space left her
for circulation, a space that sometimes seemed ample and sometimes
narrow: looking up, all the while, at the fair structure that spread itself
so amply and rose so high, but never quite making out, as yet, where
she might have entered had she wished. She had not wished till
now--such was the odd case; and what was doubtless equally odd,
besides, was that, though her raised eyes seemed to distinguish places
that must serve, from within, and especially far aloft, as apertures and
outlooks, no door appeared to give access from her convenient garden
level. The great decorated surface had remained consistently
impenetrable and inscrutable. At present, however, to her considering
mind, it was as if she had ceased merely to circle and to scan the
elevation, ceased so vaguely, so quite helplessly to stare and wonder:
she had caught herself distinctly in the act of pausing, then in that of
lingering, and finally in that of stepping unprecedentedly near. The
thing might have been, by the distance at which it kept her, a
Mahometan mosque, with which no base heretic could take a liberty;
there so hung about it the vision of one's putting off one's shoes to enter,
and even, verily, of one's paying with one's life if found there as an
interloper. She had not, certainly, arrived at the conception of paying
with her life for anything she might do; but it was nevertheless quite as
if she had sounded with a tap or two one of the rare porcelain plates.
She had knocked, in short--though she could scarce have said whether
for admission or for what; she had applied her hand to a cool smooth
spot and had waited to see what would happen. Something had
happened; it was as if a sound, at her touch, after a little, had come
back to her from within; a sound sufficiently suggesting that her
approach had been noted.
If this image, however, may represent our young woman's
consciousness of a recent change in her life--a change now but a few
days old--it must at the same time be observed that she both sought and
found in renewed circulation, as I have called it, a measure of relief
from the idea of having perhaps to answer for what she had done. The

pagoda in her blooming garden figured the arrangement--how
otherwise was it to be named?--by which, so strikingly, she had been
able to marry without breaking, as she liked to put it, with the past. She
had surrendered herself to her husband without the shadow of a reserve
or a condition, and yet she had not, all the while, given up her
father--the least little inch. She had compassed the high city of seeing
the two men beautifully take to each other, and nothing in her marriage
had marked it as more happy than this fact of its having practically
given the elder, the lonelier, a new friend. What had moreover all the
while enriched the whole aspect of success was that the latter's
marriage had been no more meassurably paid for than her own. His
having taken the same great step in the same free way had not in the
least involved the relegation of his daughter. That it was remarkable
they should have been able at once so to separate and so to keep
together had never for a moment, from however far back, been
equivocal to her; that it was remarkable had in fact quite counted, at
first and always, and for each of them equally, as part of their
inspiration and their support. There were plenty of singular things they
were NOT enamoured of--flights of brilliancy, of audacity, of
originality, that, speaking at least for the dear man and herself, were not
at all in their line; but they liked to think they had given their life this
unusual extension and this liberal form,