第199章 Chapter 3(1)

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"--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 (254) 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 were n't really thinking of and did n'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 as to which a humorous insistence could be guarded.

Sharp and sudden moreover this afternoon had been their well-nigh confessed desire just to rest together a little as from some strain long felt but never named; to rest as who should say shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand, each pair of eyes so yearningly--and indeed what could it be but so wearily?--closed as to render the collapse safe from detection by the other pair. It was positively as if in short the inward felicity of their being once more, perhaps only (255) for half an hour, simply daughter and father had glimmered out for them and they had picked up the pretext that would make it easiest. They were husband and wife--oh so immensely!--as regards other persons; but after they had dropped again on their old bench, conscious that the party on the terrace, augmented as in the past by neighbours, would do beautifully without them, it was wonderfully like their having got together into some boat and paddled off from the shore where husbands and wives, luxuriant complications, made the air too tropical. In the boat they were father and daughter, and poor Dotty and Kitty supplied abundantly, for their situation, the oars or the sail. Why, into the bargain, for that matter--this came to Maggie--could n't they always live, so far as they lived together, in a boat? She felt in her face with the question the breath of a possibility that soothed her; they needed only KNOW each other henceforth in the unmarried relation. That other sweet evening in the same place he had been as unmarried as possible--which had kept down, so to speak, the quantity of change in their state. Well then that other sweet evening was what the present sweet evening would resemble; with the quite calculable effect of an exquisite inward refreshment. They HAD after all, whatever happened, always and ever each other; each other--that was the hidden treasure and the saving truth--to do exactly what they would with: a provision full of possibilities. Who could tell as yet what, thanks to it, they would n't have done before the end?

They had meanwhile been tracing together, in the (256) golden air that toward six o'clock of a July afternoon hung about the massed Kentish woods, several features of the social evolution of her old playmates, still beckoned on, it would seem, by unattainable ideals, still falling back, beyond the sea, to their native seats, for renewals of the moral, financial, conversational--one scarce knew what to call it--outfit, and again and for ever reappearing like a tribe of Wandering Jewesses. Our couple had finally exhausted however the study of these annals--not to say animals--and Maggie was to take up after a drop a different matter, or one at least with which the immediate connexion was not at first apparent. "Were you amused at me just now--when I wondered what other people could wish to struggle for? Did you think me," she asked with some earnestness--"well, fatuous?"

"'Fatuous'?"--he seemed at a loss.

"I mean sublime in OUR happiness--as if looking down from a height.