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By Root 21378 0

’t after all falling below him. It was in fact as if, thanks to her hovering image of him confronted with this admirable creature even as she was confronted, there glowed upon her from afar, yet straight and strong, a deep explanatory light which covered the last inch of the ground. He had given her something to conform to, and she hadn’t unintelligently turned on him, ‘gone back on’ him, as he would have said, by not conforming. They were together thus, he and she, close, close together – whereas Charlotte, though rising there radiantly before her, was really off in some darkness of space that would steep her in solitude and harass her with care. The heart of the Princess swelled accordingly even in her abasement; she had kept in tune with the right, and something certainly, something that might resemble a rare flower snatched from an impossible ledge, would, and possibly soon, come of it for her. The right, the right – yes, it took this extraordinary form of humbugging, as she had called it, to the end. It was only a question of not by a hair’s breadth deflecting into the truth. So supremely was she braced. ‘You must take it from me that your anxiety rests quite on a misconception. You must take it from me that I’ve never at any moment fancied I could suffer by you.’ And marvellously she kept it up – not only kept it up but improved on it. ‘You must take it from me that I’ve never thought of you but as beautiful, wonderful and good. Which is all, I think, that you can possibly ask.’

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