The Golden Bowl, vol 2 | Page 7

them--between which her impression could
continue sharply to discriminate. Before the subsequent passages, much
later on, it was to be said, the flame of memory turned to an equalising
glow, that of a lamp in some side-chapel in which incense was thick.
The great moment, at any rate, for conscious repossession, was
doubtless the first: the strange little timed silence which she had fully
gauged, on the spot, as altogether beyond her own intention, but
which--for just how long? should she ever really know for just how
long?--she could do nothing to break. She was in the smaller
drawing-room, in which she always "sat," and she had, by calculation,
dressed for dinner on finally coming in. It was a wonder how many
things she had calculated in respect to this small incident--a matter for
the importance of which she had so quite indefinite a measure. He
would be late--he would be very late; that was the one certainty that
seemed to look her in the face. There was still also the possibility that if
he drove with Charlotte straight to Eaton Square he might think it best
to remain there even on learning she had come away. She had left no
message for him on any such chance; this was another of her small
shades of decision, though the effect of it might be to keep him still
longer absent. He might suppose she would already have dined; he
might stay, with all he would have to tell, just on purpose to be nice to
her father. She had known him to stretch the point, to these beautiful
ends, far beyond that; he had more than once stretched it to the sacrifice
of the opportunity of dressing.
If she herself had now avoided any such sacrifice, and had made herself,
during the time at her disposal, quite inordinately fresh and quite
positively smart, this had probably added, while she waited and waited,
to that very tension of spirit in which she was afterwards to find the
image of her having crouched. She did her best, quite intensely, by
herself, to banish any such appearance; she couldn't help it if she
couldn't read her pale novel--ah, that, par exemple, was beyond her! but
she could at least sit by the lamp with the book, sit there with her
newest frock, worn for the first time, sticking out, all round her, quite

stiff and grand; even perhaps a little too stiff and too grand for a
familiar and domestic frock, yet marked none the less, this time, she
ventured to hope, by incontestable intrinsic merit. She had glanced
repeatedly at the clock, but she had refused herself the weak indulgence
of walking up and down, though the act of doing so, she knew, would
make her feel, on the polished floor, with the rustle and the "hang," still
more beautifully bedecked. The difficulty was that it would also make
her feel herself still more sharply in a state; which was exactly what she
proposed not to do. The only drops of her anxiety had been when her
thought strayed complacently, with her eyes, to the front of her gown,
which was in a manner a refuge, a beguilement, especially when she
was able to fix it long enough to wonder if it would at last really satisfy
Charlotte. She had ever been, in respect to her clothes, rather timorous
and uncertain; for the last year, above all, she had lived in the light of
Charlotte's possible and rather inscrutable judgment of them.
Charlotte's own were simply the most charming and interesting that any
woman had ever put on; there was a kind of poetic justice in her being
at last able, in this particular, thanks to means, thanks quite to
omnipotence, freely to exercise her genius. But Maggie would have
described herself as, in these connections, constantly and intimately
"torn"; conscious on one side of the impossibility of copying her
companion and conscious on the other of the impossibility of sounding
her, independently, to the bottom. Yes, it was one of the things she
should go down to her grave without having known--how Charlotte,
after all had been said, really thought her stepdaughter looked under
any supposedly ingenious personal experiment. She had always been
lovely about the stepdaughter's material braveries--had done, for her,
the very best with them; but there had ever fitfully danced at the back
of Maggie's head the suspicion that these expressions were mercies, not
judgments, embodying no absolute, but only a relative, frankness.
Hadn't Charlotte, with so perfect a critical vision, if the truth were
known, given her up as hopeless--hopeless by a serious standard, and
thereby invented for her a different and inferior one, in which, as the
only thing to be done, she patiently and soothingly abetted