The Golden Bowl - Henry James [175]
It exhaled this breath in a sigh faint and unheard; her tribute, while she stood there before speaking, to realities looming through the golden mist that had already begun to be scattered. The conditions facing her had yielded for the time to the golden mist – had considerably melted away; but there they were again, definite, and it was for the next quarter of an hour as if she could have counted them one by one on her fingers. Sharp to her above all was the renewed attestation of her father’s comprehensive acceptances, which she had so long regarded as of the same quality with her own, but which, so distinctly now, she should have the complication of being obliged to deal with separately. They hadn’t yet struck her as absolutely extraordinary – which had made for her lumping them with her own, since her view of her own had but so lately begun to change; though it instantly stood out for her that there was really no new judgment of them she should be able to show without attracting in some degree his attention, without perhaps exciting his surprise and making thereby, for the situation she shared with him, some difference. She was reminded and warned by the concrete image; and for a minute Charlotte’s face, immediately presented to her, affected her as searching her own to see the reminder tell. She had not less punctually kissed her stepmother, and then had been over her father, from behind, and laid her cheek upon him; little amenities tantamount heretofore to an easy change of guard – Charlotte’s own frequent, though always cheerful, term of comparison for this process of transfer. Maggie figured thus as the relieving sentry, and so smoothly did use and custom work for them that her mate might even on this occasion, after acceptance of the password, have departed without irrelevant and, in strictness, un-soldierly gossip. This was not, none the less, what happened: inasmuch as if our young woman had been floated over her first impulse to break the existing charm at a stroke, it yet took her but an instant to sound at any risk the note she had been privately practising. If she had practised it the day before, at dinner, on Amerigo, she knew but the better how to begin for it with Mrs Verver, and it immensely helped her for that matter to be able at once to speak of the Prince as having done more to quicken than to soothe her curiosity. Frankly and gaily she had come to ask – to ask what, in their unusually prolonged campaign, the two had achieved. She had got out of her husband, she admitted, what she could, but husbands were never the persons who answered such questions ideally. He had only made her more curious, and she had arrived early this way in order to miss as little as possible of Charlotte’s story.
‘Wives, papa,’ she said, ‘are always much better reporters – though I grant,’ she added for Charlotte, ‘that fathers aren’t much better than husbands. He never,’ she smiled, ‘tells me more than a tenth of what you tell him; so I hope you haven’t told him everything yet, since in that case I shall probably have lost the best part of it.’ Maggie went, she went – she felt herself going; she reminded herself of an actress who had been studying a part and rehearsing it, but who suddenly, on the stage, before the footlights, had begun to improvise, to speak lines not in the text. It was this very sense of the stage and the footlights that kept her