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

grasp of the real itself a kind of ominous intimation. The intimation appeared to peep at her even out of his next word, lightly as he produced it.

“Isn’t it rather as if we had, Charlotte and I, for bringing us together, a benefactor in common?” And the effect, for his interlocutress, was still further to be deepened. “I somehow feel, half the time, as if he were her father-in-law too. It’s as if he had saved us both⁠—which is a fact in our lives, or at any rate in our hearts, to make of itself a link. Don’t you remember”⁠—he kept it up⁠—“how, the day she suddenly turned up for you, just before my wedding, we so frankly and funnily talked, in her presence, of the advisability, for her, of some good marriage?” And then as his friend’s face, in her extremity, quite again as with Charlotte, but continued to fly the black flag of general repudiation: “Well, we really began then, as it seems to me, the work of placing her where she is. We were wholly right⁠—and so was she. That it was exactly the thing is shown by its success. We recommended a good marriage at almost any price, so to speak, and, taking us at our word, she has made the very best. That was really what we meant, wasn’t it? Only⁠—what she has got⁠—something thoroughly good. It would be difficult, it seems to me, for her to have anything better⁠—once you allow her the way it’s to be taken. Of course if you don’t allow her that the case is different. Her offset is a certain decent freedom⁠—which, I judge, she’ll be quite contented with. You may say that will be very good of her, but she strikes me as perfectly humble about it. She proposes neither to claim it nor to use it with any sort of retentissement. She would enjoy it, I think, quite as quietly as it might be given. The ‘boat,’ you see”⁠—the Prince explained it no less considerately and lucidly⁠—“is a good deal tied up at the dock, or anchored, if you like, out in the stream. I have to jump out from time to time to stretch my legs, and you’ll probably perceive, if you give it your attention, that Charlotte really can’t help occasionally doing the same. It isn’t even a question, sometimes, of one’s getting to the dock⁠—one has to take a header and splash about in the water. Call our having remained here together tonight, call the accident of my having put them, put our illustrious friends there, on my companion’s track⁠—for I grant you this as a practical result of our combination⁠—call the whole thing one of the harmless little plunges off the deck, inevitable for each of us. Why not take them, when they occur, as inevitable⁠—and, above all, as not endangering life or limb? We shan’t drown, we shan’t sink⁠—at least I can answer for myself. Mrs. Verver too, moreover⁠—do her the justice⁠—visibly knows how to swim.”

He could easily go on, for she didn’t interrupt him; Fanny felt now that she wouldn’t have interrupted him for the world. She found his eloquence precious; there was not a drop of it that she didn’t, in a manner, catch, as it came, for immediate bottling, for future preservation. The crystal flask of her innermost attention really received it on the spot, and she had even already the vision of how, in the snug laboratory of her afterthought, she should be able chemically to analyse it. There were moments, positively, still beyond this, when, with the meeting of their eyes, something as yet unnamable came out for her in his look, when something strange and subtle and at variance with his words, something that gave them away, glimmered deep down, as an appeal, almost an incredible one, to her finer comprehension. What, inconceivably, was it like? Wasn’t it, however gross, such a rendering of anything so occult, fairly like a quintessential wink, a hint of the possibility of their really treating their subject⁠—of course on some better occasion⁠—and thereby, as well, finding it much more interesting? If this far red spark, which might have been figured by her mind as the headlight of an approaching train seen through the length of a tunnel, was not, on her side, an ignis fatuus, a mere subjective phenomenon, it twinkled there at the direct expense of what the Prince was inviting her to understand. Meanwhile too, however, and unmistakably, the real treatment of their subject did, at a given moment, sound. This was when he proceeded, with just the same perfect possession of his thought⁠—on the manner of which he couldn’t have improved⁠—to complete his successful simile by another, in fact by just the supreme touch, the touch for which it had till now been waiting. “For Mrs. Verver to be known to people so intensely and exclusively as her husband’s wife, something is wanted that, you know, they haven’t exactly got. He should manage to be known⁠—or at least to be seen⁠—a little more as his wife’s husband. You surely must by this time have seen for yourself that he has his own habits and his own ways, and that he makes, more and more⁠—as of course he has a perfect right to do⁠—his own discriminations. He’s so perfect, so ideal a father, and, doubtless largely by that very fact, a generous, a comfortable, an admirable father-in-law, that I should really feel it base to avail myself of any standpoint whatever to criticise him. To you, nevertheless, I may make just one remark; for you’re not stupid⁠—you always understand so blessedly what one means.”

He paused an instant, as if even this one remark might be difficult for him should she give no sign of encouraging him to produce it. Nothing would have induced her, however, to encourage him; she was now conscious of having never in her life stood so still or sat, inwardly, as it were, so tight; she