The Golden Bowl, vol 2 | Page 9

hour when she
would most properly be there. He hadn't in any way challenged her, it
was true, and, after those instants during which she now believed him
to have been harbouring the impression of something unusually
prepared and pointed in her attitude and array, he had advanced upon
her smiling and smiling, and thus, without hesitation at the last, had
taken her into his arms. The hesitation had been at the first, and she at
present saw that he had surmounted it without her help. She had given
him no help; for if, on the one hand, she couldn't speak for hesitation,
so on the other--and especially as he didn't ask her--she couldn't explain
why she was agitated. She had known it all the while down to her toes,
known it in his presence with fresh intensity, and if he had uttered but a
question it would have pressed in her the spring of recklessness. It had
been strange that the most natural thing of all to say to him should have
had that appearance; but she was more than ever conscious that any

appearance she had would come round, more or less straight, to her
father, whose life was now so quiet, on the basis accepted for it, that
any alteration of his consciousness even in the possible sense of
enlivenment, would make their precious equilibrium waver. THAT was
at the bottom of her mind, that their equilibrium was everything, and
that it was practically precarious, a matter of a hair's breadth for the
loss of the balance. It was the equilibrium, or at all events her
conscious fear about it, that had brought her heart into her mouth; and
the same fear was, on either side, in the silent look she and Amerigo
had exchanged. The happy balance that demanded this amount of
consideration was truly thus, as by its own confession, a delicate matter;
but that her husband had also HIS habit of anxiety and his general
caution only brought them, after all, more closely together. It would
have been most beautifully, therefore, in the name of the equilibrium,
and in that of her joy at their feeling so exactly the same about it, that
she might have spoken if she had permitted the truth on the subject of
her behaviour to ring out--on the subject of that poor little behaviour
which was for the moment so very limited a case of eccentricity.
"'Why, why' have I made this evening such a point of our not all dining
together? Well, because I've all day been so wanting you alone that I
finally couldn't bear it, and that there didn't seem any great reason why
I should try to. THAT came to me--funny as it may at first sound, with
all the things we've so wonderfully got into the way of bearing for each
other. You've seemed these last days--I don't know what: more absent
than ever before, too absent for us merely to go on so. It's all very well,
and I perfectly see how beautiful it is, all round; but there comes a day
when something snaps, when the full cup, filled to the very brim,
begins to flow over. That's what has happened to my need of you--the
cup, all day, has been too full to carry. So here I am with it, spilling it
over you--and just for the reason that is the reason of my life. After all,
I've scarcely to explain that I'm as much in love with you now as the
first hour; except that there are some hours--which I know when they
come, because they almost frighten me--that show me I'm even more so.
They come of themselves--and, ah, they've been coming! After all,
after all--!" Some such words as those were what DIDN'T ring out, yet
it was as if even the unuttered sound had been quenched here in its own
quaver. It was where utterance would have broken down by its very

weight if he had let it get so far. Without that extremity, at the end of a
moment, he had taken in what he needed to take--that his wife was
TESTIFYING, that she adored and missed and desired him. "After all,
after all," since she put it so, she was right. That was what he had to
respond to; that was what, from the moment that, as has been said, he
"saw," he had to treat as the most pertinent thing possible. He held her
close and long, in expression of their personal reunion--this, obviously,
was one way of doing so. He rubbed his cheek, tenderly, and with a
deep vague murmur, against her face, that side of her face she was not
pressing to his breast. That was, not less obviously, another way, and
there were