THE PRINCESS
a family, delightfully, uninterruptedly happy, they had still had a new felicity to discover; a felicity for which, blessedly, her father's appetite and her own in particular had been kept fresh and grateful. This livelier march of their intercourse as a whole was the thing that occasionally determined in him the clutching instinct we have glanced at; very much as if he had said to her in default of her breaking silence first: "Everything's remarkably pleasant, isn't it?—but where for it after all are we? up in a balloon and whirling through space or down in the depths of the earth, in the glimmering passages of a gold-mine?" The equilibrium, the precious condition, lasted in spite of rearrangement; there had been a fresh distribution of the different weights, but the balance persisted and triumphed: all of which was just the reason why she was forbidden, face to face with the companion of her adventure, the experiment of a test. If they balanced they balanced—she had to take that; it deprived her of every pretext for arriving, by however covert a process, at what he thought.
But she had her hours thus of feeling supremely linked to him by the rigour of their law, and when it came over her that all the while the wish on his side to spare her might be what most worked with him, this very fact of their seeming to have nothing "inward" really to talk about wrapped him up for her in a kind of sweetness that was wanting, as a consecration, even in her yearning for her husband. She was powerless however, was only more utterly hushed, when the interrupting flash came, when she would have been all ready to say to him: "Yes, this is by every appearance
73
