The Golden Bowl quotes

“Ah, darling, goodness, I think, never brought anyone out.

Goodness, when it’s real, precisely, rather keeps people in.

” He had been interested in his discrimination, which amused him. “No, it’s his way. It belongs to him.”

But it’s no more like yours than the tortuous stone staircase—half-ruined into the bargain!—in some castle of our quattrocento is like the ‘lightning elevator’ in one of Mr. Verver’s fifteen-storey buildings.

Your moral sense works by steam⁠—it sends you up like a rocket.

Ours is slow and steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing that—well, that it’s as short, in almost any case, to turn round and come down again.”

The man, not ungraciously, resigned himself.

“Well, I’ll keep it for you.”

The small quarter-of-an-hour had had its marked oddity—this she felt even by the time the open air and the Bloomsbury aspects had again, in their protest against the truth of her gathered impression, made her more or less their own.

“But it’s exquisite,” Charlotte, as if with an interest in it now made even tenderer and stranger, found herself moved to insist.

“Of course it’s exquisite. That’s the danger.”

Then a light visibly came to her—a light in which her friend suddenly and intensely showed. The reflection of it, as she smiled at him, was in her own face. “The danger—I see—is because you’re superstitious.”

“Of course it’s exquisite. That’s the danger.” Then a light visibly came to her—a light in which her friend suddenly and intensely showed. The reflection of it, as she smiled at him, was in her own face. “The danger—I see—is because you’re superstitious.”

“Per Dio, I’m superstitious! A crack is a crack⁠—and an omen’s an omen.”

“For my happiness.”

She thought again.

“Thank goodness then that if there be a crack we know it! But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don’t know⁠—!” And she smiled with the sadness of it. “We can never then give each other anything.”

He considered, but he met it. “Ah, but one does know. I do, at least—and by instinct. I don’t fail. That will always protect me.”

He had signalled—the cab was charging. She put out no hand for their separation, but she prepared to get in. Before she did so, however, she said what had been gathering while she waited.

“Well, I would marry, I think, to have something from you in all freedom.”

Verver’s approbation. The promptitude of his answer, we may in fact well surmise, had sprung not a little from a particular kindled remembrance; this had given his acknowledgment its easiest turn.

“Oh, if I’m a crystal I’m delighted that I’m a perfect one, for I believe that they sometimes have cracks and flaws⁠—in which case they’re to be had very cheap!”

He had stopped short of the emphasis it would have given his joke to add that there had been certainly no having him cheap; and it was doubtless a mark of the good taste practically reigning between them that Mr.

… and as each appears, under our last possible analysis, to have wished to make the other feel that they were, what they most finally exhaled into the evening air as their eyes mildly met may well have been a kind of helplessness in their felicity.

Their rightness, the justification of everything⁠—something they so felt the pulse of⁠—sat there with them

; but they might have been asking themselves a little blankly to what further use they could put anything so perfect. They had created and nursed and established it; they had housed it here in dignity and crowned it with comfort;

Maggie just considered.

“I’ll leave you all the good ones, but I’ll take the bad.”

“Well, that’s handsome.” He emphasised his sense of it by drawing her closer and holding her more tenderly. “It’s about all I could expect of you. So far as you’ve wronged me, therefore, we’ll call it square.

“No, father.” And the Princess was almost solemn. “Because she’s so great.”

“Great in nature, in character, in spirit. Great in life.”

“So?” Mr. Verver echoed. “What has she done—in life?”

“Yes, I live in terror,” she insisted.

“I’m a small creeping thing.”

“You’ll not persuade me that you’re not as good as Charlotte Stant,” he still placidly enough remarked.

She had been so vague and quiet about it, wonderful Charlotte, that he hadn’t known what was happening—happening, that is, as a result of her influence.

“Their fires, as they felt her, turned to smoke,”

Mrs. Assingham remarked; which he was to reflect on indeed even while they strolled.

The note of reality, in so much projected light, continued to have for him the charm and the importance of which the maximum had occasionally been reached in his great “finds”—continued, beyond any other, to keep him attentive and gratified.

Nothing perhaps might affect us as queerer, had we time to look into it, than this application of the same measure of value to such different pieces of property as old Persian carpets, say, and new human acquisitions

; all the more indeed that the amiable man was not without an inkling, on his own side, that he was, as a taster of life, economically constructed.

He had not, however, disconcerted her. “For another young woman—very much of her age, and whose relation to her has always been so different from what our marrying would make it. For another companion,” said Charlotte Stant.

“Can’t a man be, all his life then,” he almost fiercely asked, “anything but a father?”

But he went on before she could answer. “You talk about differences, but they’ve been already made—as no one knows better than Maggie. She feels the one she made herself by her own marriage—made, I mean, for me.

Still, none the less, he had his point to make—for which he took another instant. But he made it, for the third time, in the same fashion.

“They’ll manage in their own way.”

With which he got out.

“

It only wants a moon, a mandolin, and a little danger, to be a serenade.

”

“We must see the old king; we must ‘do’ the cathedral,” he said; “we must know all about it. If we could but take,” he exhaled, “the full opportunity!” And then while, for all they seemed to give him, he sounded again her eyes: “

I feel the day like a great gold cup that we must somehow drain together.

”

Oh no, she meant nothing of the sort; she knew but too well what she meant.

“I don’t make mistakes. But I perpetrate⁠—in thought⁠—crimes.”

And she spoke with all intensity. “I’m a most dreadful person. There are times when I seem not to mind a bit what I’ve done, or what I think or imagine or fear or accept;

Thus she gave him, standing off a little, the firmest, longest, deepest injunction he had ever received from her.

“Nothing⁠—in spite of everything⁠—will happen. Nothing has happened. Nothing is happening.”

He looked a trifle disappointed. “I see. For us.”

“For them? Oh, easily! We can be anything.”

“Absolute idiots. And oh,” Fanny breathed, “the way it will rest us!”

Well, he looked as if there were something in that. “But won’t they know we’re not?”

Baths of benevolence were very well, but, at least, unless one were a patient of some sort, a nervous eccentric or a lost child, one was usually not so immersed save by one’s request. It wasn’t in the least what she had requested.

She had flapped her little wings as a symbol of desired flight, not merely as a plea for a more gilded cage and an extra allowance of lumps of sugar.

Above all she hadn’t complained, not by the quaver of a syllable—so what wound in particular had she shown her fear of receiving? What wound had she received—as to which she had exchanged the least word with them?

so that she sat there, in the solid chamber of her helplessness, as in a bath of benevolence artfully prepared for her, over the brim of which she could but just manage to see by stretching her neck.

Baths of benevolence were very well, but, at least, unless one were a patient of some sort, a nervous eccentric or a lost child, one was usually not so immersed save by one’s request.

It wasn’t in the least what she had requested. She had flapped her little wings as a symbol of desired flight, not merely as a plea for a more gilded cage and an extra allowance of lumps of sugar.

I’ve pulled it out, and here I am fairly screaming at you. They’re away,” she wound up, “so they can’t hear; and I’m, by a miracle of arrangement, not at luncheon with father at home.

I live in the midst of miracles of arrangement, half of which I admit, are my own; I go about on tiptoe, I watch for every sound, I feel every breath, and yet I try all the while to seem as smooth as old satin dyed rose-colour.

Have you ever thought of me,” she asked, “as really feeling as I do?”

Mrs. Assingham, more brightly again, bridled. “Is that what you call it when you make them, for terror as you say, do as you like?”

“Ah, there wouldn’t be any terror for them if they had nothing to hide.”

Mrs. Assingham faced her—quite steady now. “Are you really conscious, love, of what you’re saying?”

It stopped everything for the present; it was an intimation to him to go and dress. But she had to insist. “

Find out for yourself!

”

“Well, what I want.

I want a happiness without a hole in it big enough for you to poke in your finger.

”

“

The golden bowl⁠—as it was to have been.

” And Maggie dwelt musingly on this obscured figure. “The bowl with all our happiness in it. The bowl without the crack.”

“The golden bowl—as it was to have been.” And Maggie dwelt musingly on this obscured figure.

“The bowl with all our happiness in it. The bowl without the crack.”

For Mrs. Assingham too the image had its force, and the precious object shone before her again, reconstituted, plausible, presentable. But wasn’t there still a piece missing? “Yet if he lets you alone and you only let him—?”

Maggie met it with appreciation, but with a reserve.

“No, I’m not extraordinary⁠—but I am, for everyone, quiet.”

“Well, that’s just what is extraordinary. ‘Quiet’ is more than I am, and you leave me far behind.” With which, again, for an instant, Mrs. Assingham frankly brooded. “ ‘Now that I understand,’ you say—but there’s one thing I don’t understand.”

Well, Maggie, if he would talk of that, could also pronounce. “Then, father, I am.”

“Oh shucks!” said Adam Verver, to whom the vernacular, in moments of deepest sincerity, could thus come back.

“I’ll believe it,” he presently added, “when Amerigo complains of you.”

These reminded states for the Princess were in fact states of renewed gaping.

So many things her father knew that she even yet didn’t!

All this, at present, with Mrs. Assingham, passed through her in quick vibrations.

That,” said Maggie with the courage of her conviction, “he ought to be ready, he ought to be happy, he ought to feel himself sworn—little as it is for the end of such a history!—to take from her.

It’s as if he wished to get off without taking anything.

”