The Golden Bowl, vol 2 | Page 8

her? Hadn't
she, in other words, assented in secret despair, perhaps even in secret
irritation, to her being ridiculous?--so that the best now possible was to
wonder, once in a great while, whether one mightn't give her the

surprise of something a little less out of the true note than usual.
Something of this kind was the question that Maggie, while the
absentees still delayed, asked of the appearance she was endeavouring
to present; but with the result, repeatedly again, that it only went and
lost itself in the thick air that had begun more and more to hang, for our
young woman, over her accumulations of the unanswered. They were
THERE, these accumulations; they were like a roomful of confused
objects, never as yet "sorted," which for some time now she had been
passing and re-passing, along the corridor of her life. She passed it
when she could without opening the door; then, on occasion, she turned
the key to throw in a fresh contribution. So it was that she had been
getting things out of the way. They rejoined the rest of the confusion; it
was as if they found their place, by some instinct of affinity, in the heap.
They knew, in short, where to go; and when she, at present, by a mental
act, once more pushed the door open, she had practically a sense of
method and experience. What she should never know about Charlotte's
thought--she tossed THAT in. It would find itself in company, and she
might at last have been standing there long enough to see it fall into its
corner. The sight moreover would doubtless have made her stare, had
her attention been more free-- the sight of the mass of vain things,
congruous, incongruous, that awaited every addition. It made her in fact,
with a vague gasp, turn away, and what had further determined this was
the final sharp extinction of the inward scene by the outward. The quite
different door had opened and her husband was there.
It had been as strange as she could consent, afterwards, to think it; it
had been, essentially, what had made the abrupt bend in her life: he had
come back, had followed her from the other house, VISIBLY
uncertain--this was written in the face he for the first minute showed
her. It had been written only for those seconds, and it had appeared to
go, quickly, after they began to talk; but while it lasted it had been
written large, and, though she didn't quite know what she had expected
of him, she felt she hadn't expected the least shade of embarrassment.
What had made the embarrassment--she called it embarrassment so as
to be able to assure herself she put it at the very worst-- what had made
the particular look was his thus distinguishably wishing to see how he
should find her. Why FIRST--that had, later on, kept coming to her; the
question dangled there as if it were the key to everything. With the

sense of it on the spot, she had felt, overwhelmingly, that she was
significant, that so she must instantly strike him, and that this had a
kind of violence beyond what she had intended. It was in fact even at
the moment not absent from her view that he might easily have made
an abject fool of her--at least for the time. She had indeed, for just ten
seconds, been afraid of some such turn: the uncertainty in his face had
become so, the next thing, an uncertainty in the very air. Three words
of impatience the least bit loud, some outbreak of "What in the world
are you 'up to', and what do you mean?" any note of that sort would
instantly have brought her low--and this all the more that heaven knew
she hadn't in any manner designed to be high. It was such a trifle, her
small breach with custom, or at any rate with his natural presumption,
that all magnitude of wonder had already had, before one could
deprecate the shadow of it, the effect of a complication. It had made for
him some difference that she couldn't measure, this meeting him at
home and alone instead of elsewhere and with others, and back and
back it kept coming to her that the blankness he showed her before he
was able to SEE might, should she choose to insist on it, have a
meaning--have, as who should say, an historic value-- beyond the
importance of momentary expressions in general. She had naturally had
on the spot no ready notion of what he might want to see; it was
enough for a ready notion, not to speak of a beating heart, that he DID
see, that he saw his wife in her own drawing-room at the