The Golden Bowl, Henry James [best books to read for young adults .TXT] 📗

then he had appeared for a little to be making time. “To put it only so,” he had mildly and happily added⁠—“to put it only so!” He had spoken as if he might easily put it much better, yet as if the humour of contented understatement fairly sufficed for the occasion. He had played then, either all consciously or all unconsciously, into Charlotte’s hands; and the effect of this was to render trebly oppressive Maggie’s conviction of Charlotte’s plan. She had done what she wanted, his wife had⁠—which was also what Amerigo had made her do. She had kept her test, Maggie’s test, from becoming possible, and had applied instead a test of her own. It was exactly as if she had known that her stepdaughter would be afraid to be summoned to say, under the least approach to cross-examination, why any change was desirable; and it was, for our young woman herself, still more prodigiously, as if her father had been capable of calculations to match, of judging it important he shouldn’t be brought to demand of her what was the matter with her. Why otherwise, with such an opportunity, hadn’t he demanded it? Always from calculation⁠—that was why, that was why. He was terrified of the retort he might have invoked: “What, my dear, if you come to that, is the matter with you?” When, a minute later on, he had followed up his last note by a touch or two designed still further to conjure away the ghost of the anomalous, at that climax verily she would have had to be dumb to the question. “There seems a kind of charm, doesn’t there? on our life⁠—and quite as if, just lately, it had got itself somehow renewed, had waked up refreshed. A kind of wicked selfish prosperity perhaps, as if we had grabbed everything, fixed everything, down to the last lovely object for the last glass case of the last corner, left over, of my old show. That’s the only takeoff, that it has made us perhaps lazy, a wee bit languid⁠—lying like gods together, all careless of mankind.”

“Do you consider that we’re languid?”⁠—that form of rejoinder she had jumped at for the sake of its pretty lightness. “Do you consider that we are careless of mankind?⁠—living as we do in the biggest crowd in the world, and running about always pursued and pursuing.”

It had made him think indeed a little longer than she had meant; but he came up again, as she might have said, smiling. “Well, I don’t know. We get nothing but the fun, do we?”

“No,” she had hastened to declare; “we certainly get nothing but the fun.”

“We do it all,” he had remarked, “so beautifully.”

“We do it all so beautifully.” She hadn’t denied this for a moment. “I see what you mean.”

“Well, I mean too,” he had gone on, “that we haven’t, no doubt, enough, the sense of difficulty.”

“Enough? Enough for what?”

“Enough not to be selfish.”

“I don’t think you are selfish,” she had returned⁠—and had managed not to wail it.

“I don’t say that it’s me particularly⁠—or that it’s you or Charlotte or Amerigo. But we’re selfish together⁠—we move as a selfish mass. You see we want always the same thing,” he had gone on⁠—“and that holds us, that binds us, together. We want each other,” he had further explained; “only wanting it, each time, for each other. That’s what I call the happy spell; but it’s also, a little, possibly, the immorality.”

“ ‘The immorality’?” she had pleasantly echoed.

“Well, we’re tremendously moral for ourselves⁠—that is for each other; and I won’t pretend that I know exactly at whose particular personal expense you and I, for instance, are happy. What it comes to, I daresay, is that there’s something haunting⁠—as if it were a bit uncanny⁠—in such a consciousness of our general comfort and privilege. Unless indeed,” he had rambled on, “it’s only I to whom, fantastically, it says so much. That’s all I mean, at any rate⁠—that it’s sort of soothing; as if we were sitting about on divans, with pigtails, smoking opium and seeing visions. ‘Let us then be up and doing’⁠—what is it Longfellow says? That seems sometimes to ring out; like the police breaking in⁠—into our opium den⁠—to give us a shake. But the beauty of it is, at the same time, that we are doing; we’re doing, that is, after all, what we went in for. We’re working it, our life, our chance, whatever you may call it, as we saw it, as we felt it, from the first. We have worked it, and what more can you do than that? It’s a good deal for me,” he had wound up, “to have made Charlotte so happy⁠—to have so perfectly contented her. You, from a good way back, were a matter of course⁠—I mean your being all right; so that I needn’t mind your knowing that my great interest, since then, has rather inevitably been in making sure of the same success, very much to your advantage as well, for Charlotte. If we’ve worked our life, our idea really, as I say⁠—if at any rate I can sit here and say that I’ve worked my share of it⁠—it has not been what you may call least by our having put Charlotte so at her ease. That has been soothing, all round; that has curled up as the biggest of the blue fumes, or whatever they are, of the opium. Don’t you see what a cropper we would have come if she hadn’t settled down as she has?” And he had concluded by turning to Maggie as for something she mightn’t really have thought of. “You, darling, in that case, I verily believe, would have been the one to hate it most.”

“To hate it⁠—?” Maggie had wondered.

“To hate our having, with our tremendous intentions, not brought it off. And I daresay I should have hated it for you even more than for myself.”

“That’s not unlikely perhaps when it was for me, after