THE PRINCESS
should never know about Charlotte's thought—she tossed that in. It would find itself in company, and she might at last have been standing there long enough to see it fall into its corner. The sight moreover would doubtless have made her stare, had her attention been more free—the sight of the mass of vain things, congruous, incongruous, that awaited every addition. It made her in fact, with a vague gasp, turn away, and what had further determined this was the final sharp extinction of the inward scene by the outward. The quite different door had opened and her husband was there.
It had been as strange as she could consent afterwards to think it; it had been essentially what had made the abrupt bend in her life: he had come back, had followed her from the other house, visibly uncertain—this was written in the face he for the first minute showed her. It had been written only for those seconds, and it had appeared to go, quickly, after they began to talk; but while it lasted it had been written large, and though she didn't quite know what she had expected of him she felt she hadn't expected the least shade of embarrassment. What had made the embarrassment—she called it embarrassment so as to be able to assure herself she put it at the very worst—what had made the particular look was his thus distinguishably wishing to see how he should find her. Why first?—that had later on kept coming to her; the question dangled there as if it were the key to everything. With the sense of it, on the spot, she had felt overwhelmingly that she was significant, that so she must instantly strike him, and that this had a kind
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