The Golden Bowl - Henry James [139]
The difficulty was, for the nerves of daily intercourse with Maggie in particular, that her imagination was clearly never ruffled by the sense of any anomaly. The great anomaly would have been that her husband, or even that her father’s wife, should prove to have been made, for the long run, after the pattern set from so far back to the Ververs. If one was so made one had certainly no business on any terms at Matcham; whereas if one wasn’t one had no business there on the particular terms – terms of conformity with the principles of Eaton Square – under which one had been so absurdly dedicated. Deep at the heart of that roused unrest in our young man which we have had to content ourselves with calling his irritation – deep in the bosom of this falsity of position glowed the red spark of his inextinguishable sense of a higher and braver propriety. There were situations that were ridiculous but that one couldn’t yet help, as for instance when one’s wife chose, in the most usual way, to make one so. Precisely here however was the difference; it had taken poor Maggie to invent a way so extremely unusual – yet to which none the less it would be too absurd that he should merely lend himself. Being thrust, systematically, with another woman, and a woman one happened, by the same token, exceedingly to like, and being so thrust that the theory of it seemed to publish one as idiotic or incapable – this was a predicament of which the dignity depended all on one’s own handling. What was supremely grotesque in fact was the essential opposition of theories – as if a galantuomo, as he at least constitutionally conceived galantuomini,2 could do anything but blush to ‘go about’ at such a rate with such a person as Mrs Verver in a state of childlike innocence, the state of our primitive parents before the Fall.3 The grotesque theory, as he would have called it, was perhaps an odd one to resent with violence, and he did it – also as a man of the world – all merciful justice; but none the less assuredly there was but one way really to mark, and for his companion as much as for himself, the commiseration in which they held it. Adequate comment on it could only be private, but it could also at least be active, and of rich and effectual comment Charlotte and he were fortunately alike capable. Wasn’t this consensus literally their only way not to be ungracious? It was positively as if the measure of their escape from that danger were given by the growth between them, during their auspicious visit, of an exquisite sense of complicity.
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He found himself therefore saying with gaiety even to Fanny Assingham, for their common concerned glance at Eaton Square, the glance that was so markedly never, as it might have been, a glance at Portland Place: ‘What would our cari sposi1 have made of it here? what would they, you know, really?’ – which overflow would have been reckless if already, and surprisingly perhaps even to himself, he hadn’t got used to thinking of this friend as a person in whom the element of protest had of late been unmistakeably allayed. He exposed himself of course to her replying: ‘Ah if it would have been so bad for them how can it be so good for you?’ – but, quite apart from the small sense the question would have had at the best, she appeared already to unite with him in confidence and cheer. He had as well his view – or at least a partial one – of the inner spring of this present comparative humility, which was all consistent with the retractation he had practically seen her make after Mr Verver’s last dinner. Without diplomatising to do so, with no effort to square her, none to bribe her to an attitude for which he would have had no use in her if it weren’t sincere, he yet felt how he both held her and moved her by the felicity of his taking pity, all instinctively, on her just discernible