Maggie's
munificence, and was enjoying, as a convenience, all the bounties of the
house. HE conversed undiscouraged, Father Mitchell--conversed mainly
with the indefinite, wandering smile of the entertainers, and the
Princess's power to feel him on the whole a blessing for these occasions
was not impaired by what was awkward in her consciousness of having,
from the first of her trouble, really found her way without his
guidance. She asked herself at times if he suspected how more than
subtly, how perversely, she had dispensed with him, and she balanced
between visions of all he must privately have guessed and certitudes
that he had guessed nothing whatever. He might nevertheless have been
so urbanely filling up gaps, at present, for the very reason that his
instinct, sharper than the expression of his face, had sufficiently
served him--made him aware of the thin ice, figuratively speaking, and
of prolongations of tension, round about him, mostly foreign to the
circles in which luxury was akin to virtue. Some day in some happier
season, she would confess to him that she hadn't confessed, though
taking so much on her conscience; but just now she was carrying in her
weak, stiffened hand a glass filled to the brim, as to which she had
recorded a vow that no drop should overflow. She feared the very breath
of a better wisdom, the jostle of the higher light, of heavenly help
itself; and, in addition, however that might be, she drew breath this
afternoon, as never yet, in an element heavy to oppression. Something
grave had happened, somehow and somewhere, and she had, God knew, her
choice of suppositions: her heart stood still when she wondered above
all if the cord mightn't at last have snapped between her husband and
her father. She shut her eyes for dismay at the possibility of such a
passage--there moved before them the procession of ugly forms it might
have taken. "Find out for yourself!" she had thrown to Amerigo, for
her last word, on the question of who else "knew," that night of the
breaking of the Bowl; and she flattered herself that she hadn't since
then helped him, in her clear consistency, by an inch. It was what she
had given him, all these weeks, to be busy with, and she had again and
again lain awake for the obsession of this sense of his uncertainty
ruthlessly and endlessly playing with his dignity. She had handed him
over to an ignorance that couldn't even try to become indifferent
and that yet wouldn't proje