The Golden Bowl, vol 2 | Page 5

which many families, many
couples, and still more many pairs of couples, would not have found
workable. That last truth had been distinctly brought home to them by
the bright testimony, the quite explicit envy, of most of their friends,
who had remarked to them again and again that they must, on all the
showing, to keep on such terms, be people of the highest
amiability--equally including in the praise, of course, Amerigo and
Charlotte. It had given them pleasure--as how should it not?--to find
themselves shed such a glamour; it had certainly, that is, given pleasure
to her father and herself, both of them distinguishably of a nature so
slow to presume that they would scarce have been sure of their triumph
without this pretty reflection of it. So it was that their felicity had
fructified; so it was that the ivory tower, visible and admirable
doubtless, from any point of the social field, had risen stage by stage.
Maggie's actual reluctance to ask herself with proportionate sharpness
why she had ceased to take comfort in the sight of it represented

accordingly a lapse from that ideal consistency on which her moral
comfort almost at any time depended. To remain consistent she had
always been capable of cutting down more or less her prior term.
Moving for the first time in her life as in the darkening shadow of a
false position, she reflected that she should either not have ceased to be
right--that is, to be confident--or have recognised that she was wrong;
though she tried to deal with herself, for a space, only as a
silken-coated spaniel who has scrambled out of a pond and who rattles
the water from his ears. Her shake of her head, again and again, as she
went, was much of that order, and she had the resource, to which, save
for the rude equivalent of his generalising bark, the spaniel would have
been a stranger, of humming to herself hard as a sign that nothing had
happened to her. She had not, so to speak, fallen in; she had had no
accident and had not got wet; this at any rate was her pretension until
after she began a little to wonder if she mightn't, with or without
exposure, have taken cold. She could at all events remember no time at
which she had felt so excited, and certainly none--which was another
special point--that so brought with it as well the necessity for
concealing excitement. This birth of a new eagerness became a high
pastime, in her view, precisely by reason of the ingenuity required for
keeping the thing born out of sight. The ingenuity was thus a private
and absorbing exercise, in the light of which, might I so far multiply
my metaphors, I should compare her to the frightened but clinging
young mother of an unlawful child. The idea that had possession of her
would be, by our new analogy, the proof of her misadventure, but
likewise, all the while, only another sign of a relation that was more to
her than anything on earth. She had lived long enough to make out for
herself that any deep-seated passion has its pangs as well as its joys,
and that we are made by its aches and its anxieties most richly
conscious of it. She had never doubted of the force of the feeling that
bound her to her husband; but to become aware, almost suddenly, that
it had begun to vibrate with a violence that had some of the effect of a
strain would, rightly looked at, after all but show that she was, like
thousands of women, every day, acting up to the full privilege of
passion. Why in the world shouldn't she, with every right--if, on
consideration, she saw no good reason against it? The best reason
against it would have been the possibility of some consequence

disagreeable or inconvenient to others-- especially to such others as had
never incommoded her by the egotism of THEIR passions; but if once
that danger were duly guarded against the fulness of one's measure
amounted to no more than the equal use of one's faculties or the proper
playing of one's part. It had come to the Princess, obscurely at first, but
little by little more conceivably, that her faculties had not for a good
while been concomitantly used; the case resembled in a manner that of
her once-loved dancing, a matter of remembered steps that had grown
vague from her ceasing to go to balls. She would go to balls again--that
seemed, freely, even crudely, stated, the remedy; she would take out of
the deep receptacles in which she had laid them away the various
ornaments congruous with the greater occasions, and of which her store,
she liked to think, was