The Golden Bowl - Henry James [257]
Charlotte held her a moment longer: she needed – not then to have appeared only tactless – the last word. ‘It’s much more, my dear, than I dreamed of asking. I only wanted your denial.’
‘Well then you have it.’
‘Upon your honour?’
‘Upon my honour.’
And she made a point even, our young woman, of not turning away. Her grip of her shawl had loosened – she had let it fall behind her; but she stood there for anything more and till the weight should be lifted. With which she saw soon enough what more was to come. She saw it in Charlotte’s face and felt it make between them, in the air, a chill that completed the coldness of their conscious perjury. ‘Will you kiss me on it then?’
She couldn’t say yes, but she didn’t say no; what availed her still however was to measure in her passivity how much too far Charlotte had come to retreat. But there was something different also, something for which, while her cheek received the prodigious kiss, she had her opportunity – the sight of the others, who, having risen from their cards to join the absent members of their party, had reached the open door at the end of the room and flagrantly stopped short in presence of the demonstration that awaited them. Her husband and her father were in front, and Charlotte’s embrace of her – which wasn’t to be distinguished for them either, she felt, from her embrace of Charlotte – took on with their arrival a high publicity.
3
Her father had asked her three days later and in an interval of calm how she was affected, in the light of their reappearance and of their now perhaps richer fruition, by Dotty and Kitty and by the once formidable Mrs Rance; and the consequence of this enquiry had been for the pair just such another stroll together away from the rest of the party and off into the park as had asserted its need to them on the occasion of the previous visit of these anciently more agitating friends – that of their long talk on a sequestered bench beneath one of the great trees, when the particular question had come up for them the then purblind discussion of which at their enjoyed leisure Maggie had formed the habit of regarding as the ‘first beginning’ of their present situation. The whirligig of time had thus brought round for them again, on their finding themselves face to face while the others were gathering for tea on the terrace, the same odd impulse quietly to ‘slope’1 – so Adam Verver himself, as they went, familiarly expressed it – that had acted in its way of old; acted for the distant autumn afternoon and for the sharpness of their since so outlived crisis. It might have been funny to them now that the presence of Mrs Rance and the Lutches – and with symptoms too at that time less developed – had once for their anxiety and their prudence constituted a crisis; it might have been funny that these ladies could ever have figured to their imagination as a symbol of dangers vivid enough to precipitate the need of a remedy. This amount of entertainment and assistance they were indeed disposed to extract from their actual impressions; they had been finding it for months past, by Maggie’s view, a resource and a relief to talk, with an approach to intensity, when they met, of all the people they weren’t really thinking of and didn’t really care about, the people with whom their existence had begun almost to swarm; and they closed in at present round the spectres of their past, as they permitted themselves to describe the three ladies, with a better imitation of enjoying their theme than they had been able to achieve, certainly, during the stay for instance of the Castledeans. The Castledeans were a new joke comparatively, and they had had – always to Maggie’s view – to teach themselves the way of it; whereas the Detroit, the Providence party, rebounding so from Providence, from Detroit, was an old and ample one, of which the most could be made and