The Golden Bowl - Henry James [249]
‘ “Fatuous”?’ – he seemed at a loss.
‘I mean sublime in our happiness – as if looking down from a height. Or rather sublime in our general position – that’s what I mean.’ She spoke as from the habit of her anxious conscience – something that disposed her frequently to assure herself for her human commerce of the state of the ‘books’ of the spirit. ‘Because I don’t at all want,’ she explained, ‘to be blinded or made “sniffy” by any sense of a social situation.’ Her father listened to this declaration as if the precautions of her general mercy could still, as they betrayed themselves, have surprises for him – to say nothing of a charm of delicacy and beauty; he might have been wishing to see how far she could go and where she would, all touchingly to him, arrive. But she waited a little – as if made nervous precisely by feeling him depend too much on what she said. They were avoiding the serious, standing off anxiously from the real, and they fell again and again, as if to disguise their precaution itself, into the tone of the time that came back to them from their other talk, when they had shared together this same refuge. ‘Don’t you remember,’ she went on, ‘how, when they were here before, I broke it to you that I wasn’t so very sure we ourselves had the thing itself?’
He did his best to do so. ‘Had you mean a social situation?’
‘Yes – after Fanny Assingham had first broken it to me that at the rate we were going we should never have one.’
‘Which was what put us on Charlotte?’ Oh yes, they had had it over quite often enough for him easily to remember.
Maggie had another pause – taking it from him that he now could both affirm and admit without wincing that they had been at their critical moment ‘put’ on Charlotte. It was as if this recognition had been threshed out between them as fundamental to the honest view of their success. ‘Well,’ she continued, ‘I recall how I felt, about Kitty and Dotty, that even if we had already then been more “placed”, or whatever you may call what we are now, it still wouldn’t have been an excuse for wondering why others couldn’t obligingly leave me more exalted by having themselves smaller ideas. For those,’ she said, ‘were the feelings we used to have.’
‘Oh yes,’ he responded philosophically – ‘I remember the feelings we used to have.’
Maggie appeared to wish to plead for them a little in tender retrospect – as if they had been also respectable. ‘It was bad enough, I thought, to have no sympathy in your heart when you had a position. But it was worse to be sublime about it – as I was so afraid, as I’m in fact still afraid of being – when it wasn’t even there to support one.’ And she put forth again the earnestness she might have been taking herself as having outlived; became for it – which was doubtless too often even now her danger – almost sententious. ‘One must always, whether or no, have some imagination of the states of others – of what they may feel deprived of. However,’ she added, ‘Kitty and Dotty couldn’t imagine we were deprived of anything. And now, and now –!’ But she stopped as for indulgence to their wonder and envy.
‘And now they see still more that we can have got everything and kept everything and yet not be proud.’
‘No, we’re not proud,’ she answered after a moment. ‘I’m not sure we’re quite proud enough.’ Yet she changed the next instant that subject too. She could only do so however by harking back – as if it had been a fascination. She might have been wishing, under this renewed, this still more suggestive visitation, to keep him with her for remounting the stream of time and dipping again, for the softness of the water, into the contracted basin of the past. ‘We talked about it – we talked about it; you don’t remember so well as I. You too didn’t know – and it was beautiful of you; like Kitty and Dotty you too thought we had a position, and were surprised when I thought we ought to have told them we weren’t doing for them what they supposed. In fact,’ Maggie pursued, ‘we’re not doing it now. We’re not, you see, really introducing them. I mean not to the people they want.