The Golden Bowl - Henry James [170]
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’s 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 ways enough in short for his extemporised ease, for the good humour she was afterwards to find herself thinking of as his infinite tact. This last was partly no doubt because the question of tact might be felt as having come up at the end of a quarter of an hour during which he had liberally talked and she had genially questioned. He had told her of his day, the happy thought of his roundabout journey with Charlotte, all their cathedral-hunting adventure, and how it had turned out rather more of an affair than they expected. The moral of it was at any rate that he was tired verily, and must have a bath and dress – to which end she would kindly excuse him for the shortest time possible. She was to remember afterwards something that had passed between them on this – how he had looked, for her, during an instant, at the door, before going out, how he had met her asking him, in hesitation first, then quickly in decision, whether she couldn’t help him by going up with him. He had perhaps also for a moment hesitated, but he had declined her offer, and she was to preserve, as I say, the memory of the smile with which he had opined that at that rate they wouldn’t dine till ten o’clock and that he should go straighter and faster alone. Such things, as I say, were to come back to her – they played through her full aftersense like lights on the whole impression; the subsequent parts of the experience were not to have blurred their distinctness. One of these subsequent parts, the first, had been the not inconsiderable length, to her later and more analytic consciousness, of this second wait for her husband’s reappearance. She might certainly, with the best will in the world, had she gone up with him, have been more in his way than not, since people could really almost always hurry better without help than with it. Still she could hardly have made him take more time than he struck her as actually taking, though it must indeed be added that there was now in this much-thinking little person’s state of mind no mere crudity of impatience. Something had happened, rapidly, with the beautiful sight of him and with the drop of her fear of having annoyed him by making him go to and fro. Subsidence of the fearsome, for Maggie’s spirit, was always at first positive emergence of the