The Golden Bowl - Henry James [178]
concomitants of feverish success all the while was the perception that in another quarter too things were being made easy. Charlotte’s alacrity in meeting her had in one sense operated slightly overmuch as an intervention: it had begun to reabsorb her at the very hour of her husband’s showing her that to be all there, as the phrase was, he likewise only required – as one of the other phrases was too – the straight tip. She had heard him talk about the straight tip in his moods of amusement at English slang, in his remarkable displays of assimilative power, power worthy of better causes and higher inspirations; and he had taken it from her at need in a way that, certainly in the first glow of relief, had made her brief interval seem large. Then, however immediately, and even though superficially, there had declared itself a readjustment of relations to which she was, once more, practically a little sacrificed. ‘I must do everything,’ she had said, ‘without letting papa see what I do – at least till it’s done!’ but she scarce knew how she proposed even for the next few days to blind or beguile this participant in her life. What had in fact promptly enough happened, she presently recognised, was that if her stepmother had beautifully taken possession of her, and if she had virtually been rather snatched again thereby from her husband’s side, so on the other hand this had with as little delay entailed some very charming assistance for her in Eaton Square. When she went home with Charlotte, from whatever happy demonstration, for the benefit of the world in which they supposed themselves to live, that there was no smallest reason why their closer association shouldn’t be public and acclaimed – at these times she regularly found that Amerigo had come either to sit with his father-in-law in the absence of the ladies or to make on his side precisely some such display of the easy working of the family life as would represent the equivalent of her excursions with Charlotte. Under this particular impression it was that everything in Maggie most melted and went to pieces – everything, that is, that belonged to her disposition to challenge the perfection of their common state. It divided them again, that was true, this particular turn of the tide – cut them up afresh into pairs and parties; quite as if a sense for the equilibrium was what, between them all, had most power of insistence; quite as if Amerigo himself were all the while at bottom equally thinking of it and watching it. But as against that he was making her father not miss her, and he could have rendered neither of them a more excellent service. He was acting in short on a cue, the cue given him by observation; it had been enough for him to see the shade of change in her behaviour: his instinct for relations, the most exquisite conceivable, prompted him immediately to meet and match the difference, to play somehow into its hands. That was what it was, she renewedly felt, to have married a man who was sublimely a gentleman; so that in spite of her not wanting to translate all their delicacies into the grossness of discussion she yet found again and again in Portland Place moments for saying: ‘If I didn’t love you, you know, for yourself, I should still love you for him.’ He looked at her after such speeches as Charlotte looked in Eaton Square when she called her attention to his benevolence: through the dimness of the almost musing smile that took account of her extravagance, harmless though it might be, as a tendency to reckon with. ‘But my poor child,’ Charlotte might under this pressure have been on the point of replying, ‘that’s the way nice people are, all round – so that why should one be surprised about it? We’re all nice together – as why shouldn’t we be? If we hadn’t been we wouldn’t have gone far – and I consider that we’ve gone very far indeed. Why should you “take on” as if you weren’t a perfect dear yourself, capable of all the sweetest things? – as if you hadn’t in fact grown up in an atmosphere, the atmosphere of all the good things that I recognised, even of