The Golden Bowl - Henry James [170]
By the end of a week, the week that had begun especially with her morning hour in Eaton Square between her father and his wife, her consciousness of being beautifully treated had become again verily greater than her consciousness of anything else; and I must add moreover that she at last found herself rather oddly wondering what else, as a consciousness, could have been quite so overwhelming. Charlotte’s response to the experiment of being more with her ought, as she very well knew, to have stamped the experiment with the feeling of success; so that if the success itself seemed a boon less substantial than the original image of it, it enjoyed thereby a certain analogy with our young woman’s aftertaste of Amerigo’s own determined demonstrations. Maggie was to have retained, for that matter, more than one aftertaste, and if I have spoken of the impressions fixed in her as soon as she had so insidiously taken the field, a definite note must be made of her perception, during those moments, of Charlotte’s prompt uncertainty. She had shown, no doubt – she couldn’t not have shown – that she had arrived with an idea; quite exactly as she had shown her husband the night before that she was awaiting him with a sentiment. This analogy in the two situations was to keep up for her the remembrance of a kinship of expression in the two faces – in respect to which all she as yet professed to herself was that she had affected them, or at any rate the sensibility each of them so admirably covered, in the same way. To make the comparison at all was, for Maggie, to return to it often, to brood upon it, to extract from it the last dregs of its interest – to play with it in short nervously, vaguely, incessantly, as she might have played with a medallion containing on either side a cherished little portrait and suspended round her neck by a gold chain of a firm fineness that no effort would ever snap. The miniatures were back to back, but she saw them for ever face to face, and when she looked from one to the other she found in Charlotte’s eyes the gleam of the momentary ‘What does she really want?’ that had come and gone for her in the Prince’s. So again she saw the other light, the light touched into a glow both in Portland Place and in Eaton Square, as soon as she had betrayed that she wanted no harm – wanted no greater harm of Charlotte, that is, than to take in that she meant to go out with her. She had been present at that process as personally as she might have been present at some other domestic incident – the hanging of a new picture say, or the fitting of the Principino with his first little trousers.
She remained present accordingly all the week, so charmingly and systematically did Mrs Verver now welcome her company. Charlotte had but wanted the hint, and what was it but the hint after all that during the so subdued but so ineffaceable passage in the breakfast-room she had seen her take? It had been taken moreover not with resignation, not with qualifications or reserves, however bland; it had been taken with avidity, with gratitude, with a grace of gentleness that supplanted explanations. The very liberality of this accommodation might indeed have appeared in the event to give its own account of the matter – as if it had fairly written the Princess down as a person of variations and had accordingly conformed but to a rule of tact in accepting these caprices for law. The caprice actually prevailing happened to be that the advent of one of the ladies anywhere should, till the fit had changed, become the sign unfailingly of the advent of the other; and it was emblazoned in rich colour on the bright face of this period that Mrs Verver only wished to know on any occasion what was expected of her, only held herself there for instructions, in order even to better them if possible. The two young women, while the passage lasted, became again very much the companions of other days, the days of Charlotte’s prolonged visits to the admiring and bountiful Maggie, the days when equality of condition for them had been all the result of the latter