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Title: The Golden Bowl, Volume II

Author: Henry James

Release Date: July, 2003 [Etext# 4263]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on December 24, 2001]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Golden Bowl, Volume I, by Henry James
**********This file should be named 4263.txt or 4263.zip**********

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THE GOLDEN BOWL, VOLUME II

BOOK SECOND: THE PRINCESS


PART FOURTH


                             XXV

It was not till many days had passed that the Princess began to
accept the idea of having done, a little, something she was not
always doing, or indeed that of having listened to any inward
voice that spoke in a new tone. Yet these instinctive
postponements of reflection were the fruit, positively, of
recognitions and perceptions already active; of the sense, above
all, that she had made, at a particular hour, made by the mere
touch of her hand, a difference in the situation so long present
to her as practically unattackable. This situation had been
occupying, for months and months, the very centre of the garden
of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange,
tall tower of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful, beautiful,
but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard, bright
porcelain,  and figured and adorned, at the overhanging
eaves, with silver bells that tinkled, ever so charmingly, when
stirred by chance airs. She had walked round and round it--that
was what she felt; she had carried on her existence in the space
left her for circulation, a space that sometimes seemed ample and
sometimes narrow: looking up, all the while, at the fair
structure that spread itself so amply and rose so high, but never
quite making out, as yet, where she might have entered had she
wished. She had not wished till now--such was the odd case; and
what was doubtless equally odd, besides, was that, though her
raised eyes seemed to distinguish places that must serve, from
within, and especially far aloft, as apertures and outlooks, no
door appeared to give access from her convenient garden level.
The great decorated surface had remained consistently
impenetrable and inscrutable. At present, however, to her
considering mind, it was as if she had ceased merely to circle
and to scan the elevation, ceased so vaguely, so quite helplessly
to stare and wonder: she had caught herself distinctly in the act
of pausing, then in that of lingering, and finally in that of
stepping unprecedentedly near. The thing might have been, by the
distance at which it kept her, a Mahometan mosque, with which no
base heretic could take a liberty; there so hung about it the
vision of one's putting off one's shoes to enter, and even,
verily, of one's paying with one's life if found there as an
interloper. She had not, certainly, arrived at the conception of
paying with her life for anything she might do; but it was
nevertheless quite as if she had sounded with a tap or two one of
the rare porcelain plates. She had knocked, in short--though she
could scarce have said whether for admission or for what; she had
applied her hand to a cool smooth spot and had waited to see what
would happen. Something had happened; it was as if a sound, at
her touch, after a little, had come back to her from within; a
sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted.

If this image, however, may represent our young woman's
consciousness of a recent change in her life--a change now but a
few days old--it must at the same time be observed that she both
sought and found in renewed circulation, as I have called it, a
measure of relief from the idea of having perhaps to answer for
what she had done. The pagoda in her blooming garden figured the
arrangement--how otherwise was it to be named?--by which, so
strikingly, she had been able to marry without breaking, as she
liked to put it, with the past. She had surrendered herself to
her husband without the shadow of a reserve or a condition, and
yet she had not, all the while, given up her father--the least
little inch. She had compassed the high city of seeing the two
men beautifully take to each other, and nothing in her marriage
had marked it as more happy than this fact of its having
practically given the elder, the lonelier, a new friend. What had
moreover all the while enriched the whole aspect of success was
that the latter's marriage had been no more meassurably paid for
than her own. His having taken the same great step in the same
free way had not in the least involved the relegation of his
daughter. That it was remarkable they should have been able at
once so to separate and so to keep together had never for a
moment, from however far back, been equivocal to her; that it was
remarkable had in fact quite counted, at first and always, and
for each of them equally, as part of their inspiration and their
support. There were plenty of singular things they were NOT
enamoured of--flights of brilliancy, of audacity, of originality,
that, speaking at least for the dear man and herself, were not at
all in their line; but they liked to think they had given their
life this unusual extension and this liberal form, which many
families, many couples, and still more many pairs of couples,
would not have found workable. That last truth had been
distinctly brought home to them by the bright testimony, the
quite explicit envy, of most of their friends, who had remarked
to them again and again that they must, on all the showing, to
keep on such terms, be people of the highest amiability--equally
including in the praise, of course, Amerigo and Charlotte. It had
given them pleasure--as how should it not?--to find themselves
shed such a glamour; it had certainly, that is, given pleasure to
her father and herself, both of them distinguishably of a nature
so slow to presume that they would scarce have been sure of their
triumph without this pretty reflection of it. So it was that
their felicity had fructified; so it was that the ivory tower,
visible and admirable doubtless, from any point of the social
field, had risen stage by stage. Maggie's actual reluctance to
ask herself with proportionate sharpness why she had ceased to
take comfort in the sight of it represented accordingly a lapse
from that ideal consistency on which her moral comfort almost at
any time depended. To remain consistent she had always been
capable of cutting down more