Quotation from: The Golden Bowl

Written by: Henry James


It had been as strange as she could consent, afterwards, to think
it; it had been, essentially, what had made the abrupt bend in
her life: he had come back, had followed her from the other
house, VISIBLY uncertain--this was written in the face he for the
first minute showed her. It had been written only for those
seconds, and it had appeared to go, quickly, after they
began to talk; but while it lasted it had been written large,
and, though she didn't quite know what she had expected of him,
she felt she hadn't expected the least shade of embarrassment.
What had made the embarrassment--she called it embarrassment so
as to be able to assure herself she put it at the very worst--
what had made the particular look was his thus distinguishably
wishing to see how he should find her. Why FIRST--that had, later
on, kept coming to her; the question dangled there as if it were
the key to everything. With the sense of it on the spot, she had
felt, overwhelmingly, that she was significant, that so she must
instantly strike him, and that this had a kind of violence beyond
what she had intended. It was in fact even at the moment not
absent from her view that he might easily have made an abject
fool of her--at least for the time. She had indeed, for just ten
seconds, been afraid of some such turn: the uncertainty in his
face had become so, the next thing, an uncertainty in the very
air. Three words of impatience the least bit loud, some outbreak
of "What in the world are you 'up to', and what do you mean?" any
note of that sort would instantly have brought her low--and this
all the more that heaven knew she hadn't in any manner designed
to be high. It was such a trifle, her small breach with custom,
or at any rate with his natural presumption, that all magnitude
of wonder had already had, before one could deprecate the shadow
of it, the effect of a complication. It had made for him some
difference that she couldn't measure, this meeting him at home
and alone instead of elsewhere and with others, and back
and back it kept coming to her that the blankness he showed her
before he was able to SEE might, should she choose to insist on
it, have a meaning--have, as who should say, an historic value--
beyond the importance of momentary expressions in general. She
had naturally had on the spot no ready notion of what he might
want to see; it was enough for a ready notion, not to speak of a
beating heart, that he DID see, that he saw his wife in her own
drawing-room at the hour when she would most properly be there.
He hadn't in any way challenged her, it was true, and, after
those instants during which she now believed him to have been
harbouring the impression of something unusually prepared and
pointed in her attitude and array, he had advanced upon her
smiling and smiling, and thus, without hesitation at the last,
had taken her into his arms. The hesitation had been at the
first, and she at present saw that he had surmounted it without
her help. She had given him no help; for if, on the one hand, she
couldn't speak for hesitation, so on the other--and especially as
he didn't ask her--she couldn't explain why she was agitated. She
had known it all the while down to her toes, known it in his
presence with fresh intensity, and if he had uttered but a
question it would have pressed in her the spring of recklessness.
It had been strange that the most natural thing of all to say to
him should have had that appearance; but she was more than ever
conscious that any appearance she had would come round, more or
less straight, to her father, whose life was now so quiet, on the
basis accepted for it, that any alteration of his consciousness
even in the possible sense of enlivenment, would make their
precious equilibrium waver. THAT was at the bottom of her mind,
that their equilibrium was everything, and that it was
practically precarious, a matter of a hair's breadth for the loss
of the balance. It was the equilibrium, or at all events her
conscious fear about it, that had brought her heart into her
mouth; and the same fear was, on either side, in the silent look
she and Amerigo had exchanged. The happy balance that demanded
this amount of consideration was truly thus, as by its own
confession, a delicate matter; but that her husband had also HIS
habit of anxiety and his general caution only brought them, after
all, more closely together. It would have been most beautifully,
therefore, in the name of the equilibrium, and in that of her joy
at their feeling so exactly the same about it, that she might
have spoken if she had permitted the truth on the subject of her
behaviour to ring out--on the subject of that poor little
behaviour which was for the moment so very limited a case of
eccentricity.

PREVIOUS GROUP HOME SITE HOME NEXT
Old Dominion University CS Dept
Designed by Joan A. Smith for the CRATE project
Created: 2007-2-22T13:32:56Z
Part of the CratePreservation2 Project
Change Tag: ~~ 0 ~~
Part of a series of experiments in web preservation under the direction of Michael L. Nelson, Ph.D.