The Golden Bowl - Henry James [105]
He thought. ‘Not if it satisfies you. I don’t require it.’
But she gave him, as for her conscience, another chance. ‘You can if you like.’
He hesitated afresh, but as for amiability, not for curiosity. ‘Is it funny.’
Thus, finally, she again dropped her eyes on it, drawing in her lips a little. ‘No – I call it grave.’
‘Ah then I don’t want it.’
‘Very grave,’ said Charlotte Stant.
‘Well, what did I tell you of him?’ he asked, rejoicing, as they started: a question for all answer to which, before she took his arm, the girl thrust her paper crumpled into the pocket of her coat.
BOOK THIRD
1
Charlotte, halfway up the ‘monumental’ staircase, had begun by waiting alone – waiting to be rejoined by her companion, who had gone down all the way, as in common kindness bound, and who, his duty performed, would know where to find her. She was meanwhile, though extremely apparent, not perhaps absolutely advertised; but she wouldn’t have cared if she had been – so little was it by this time her first occasion of facing society with a consciousness materially, with a confidence quite splendidly, enriched. For a couple of years now she had known as never before what it was to look ‘well’ – to look, that is, as well as she had always felt, from far back, that in certain conditions she might. On such an evening as this, that of a great official party in the full flush of the London spring-time, the conditions affected her, her nerves, her senses, her imagination, as all profusely present; so that perhaps at no moment yet had she been so justified of her faith as at the particular instant of our being again concerned with her, that of her chancing to glance higher up from where she stood and meeting in consequence the quiet eyes of Colonel Assingham, who had his elbows on the broad balustrade of the great gallery overhanging the staircase and who immediately exchanged with her one of his most artlessly familiar signals. This simplicity of his visual attention struck her, even with the other things she had to think about, as the quietest note in the whole high pitch – much in fact as if she had pressed a finger on a chord or a key and created, for the number of seconds, an arrest of vibration, a more muffled thump. The sight of him suggested indeed that Fanny would be there, though so far as opportunity went she hadn’t seen her. This was about the limit of what it could suggest.
The air, however, had suggestions enough – it abounded in them, many of them precisely helping to constitute those conditions with which, for our young woman, the hour was brilliantly crowned. She was herself in truth crowned, and it all hung together, melted together, in light and colour and sound: the unsurpassed diamonds that her head so happily carried, the other jewels, the other perfections of aspect and arrangement that made her personal scheme a success, the proved private theory that materials to work with had been all she required and that there were none too precious for her to understand and use – to which might be added lastly, as the strong-scented flower of the total sweetness, an easy command, a high enjoyment, of her crisis. For a crisis she was ready to take it, and this ease it was, doubtless, that helped her, while she waited, to the right assurance, to the right indifference, to the right expression, and above all, as she felt, to the right view of her opportunity for happiness – unless indeed the opportunity itself, rather, were, in its mere strange amplitude, the producing, the precipitating cause. The ordered revellers, rustling and shining, with sweep of train and glitter of star and clink of sword, and yet for all this but so imperfectly articulate, so vaguely vocal – the double stream of the coming and the going, flowing together where she stood, passed her, brushed her, treated her to much crude contemplation and now and then to a spasm of speech, an offered hand, even in some cases to an unencouraged pause; but she missed no countenance and invited no protection: she fairly