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e Golden Bowl
that is, his conditions, so fortunate as they stood—he should
have wished to marry at all.” ere it was then—exactly
what she knew would come, and exactly, for reasons that
seemed now to thump at her heart, as distressing to her. Yet
she was resolved, meanwhile, not to suer, as they used to
say of the martyrs, then and there; not to suer, odiously,
helplessly, in public—which could be prevented but by her
breaking o, with whatever inconsequence; by her treating
their discussion as ended and getting away. She suddenly
wanted to go home much as she had wanted, an hour or two
before, to come. She wanted to leave well behind her both
her question and the couple in whom it had, abruptly, taken
such vivid form—but it was dreadful to have the appearance
of disconcerted ight. Discussion had of itself, to her sense,
become danger—such light, as from open crevices, it let in;
and the overt recognition of danger was worse than anything
else. e worst in fact came while she was thinking how she
could retreat and still not overtly recognise. Her face had
betrayed her trouble, and with that she was lost. “I’m afraid,
however,” the Prince said, “that I, for some reason, distress
you—for which I beg your pardon. We’ve always talked so
well together—it has been, from the beginning, the greatest
pull for me.” Nothing so much as such a tone could have
quickened her collapse; she felt he had her now at his mercy,
and he showed, as he went on, that he knew it. “We shall
talk again, all the same, better than ever—I depend on it too
much. Don’t you remember what I told you, so denitely, one
day before my marriage?—that, moving as I did in so many
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ways among new things, mysteries, conditions, expectations,
assumptions dierent from any I had known, I looked to
you, as my original sponsor, my fairy godmother, to see me
through. I beg you to believe,” he added, “that I look to you
yet.”
His very insistence had, fortunately, the next moment,
aected her as bringing her help; with which, at least, she
could hold up her head to speak. “Ah, you ARE through—
you were through long ago. Or if you aren’t you ought to be.”
“Well then, if I ought to be it’s all the more reason why you
should continue to help me. Because, very distinctly, I assure
you, I’m not. e new things or ever so many of them—are
still for me new things; the mysteries and expectations and
assumptions still contain an immense element that I’ve failed
to puzzle out. As we’ve happened, so luckily, to nd ourselves
again really taking hold together, you must let me, as soon
as possible, come to see you; you must give me a good, kind
hour. If you refuse it me”—and he addressed himself to her
continued reserve—”I shall feel that you deny, with a stony
stare, your responsibility.”
At this, as from a sudden shake, her reserve proved
an inadequate vessel. She could bear her own, her private
reference to the weight on her mind, but the touch of another
hand made it too horribly press. “Oh, I deny responsibility—
to YOU. So far as I ever had it I’ve done with it.”
He had been, all the while, beautifully smiling; but she
made his look, now, penetrate her again more. “As to whom
then do you confess it?”
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“Ah, mio caro, that’s—if to anyone—my own business!”
He continued to look at her hard. “You give me up then?”
It was what Charlotte had asked her ten minutes before,
and its coming from him so much in the same way shook her
in her place. She was on the point of replying “Do you and
she agree together for what you’ll say to me?”—but she was
glad afterwards to have checked herself in time, little as her
actual answer had perhaps bettered it. “I think I don’t know
what to make of you.”
“You must receive me at least,” he said.
“Oh, please, not till I’m ready for you!”—and, though she
found a laugh for it, she had to turn away. She had never
turned away from him before, and it was quite positively for
her as if she were altogether afraid of him.
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XVI
Later on, when their hired brougham had, with the long
vociferation that tormented her impatience, been extricated
from the endless rank, she rolled into the London night,
beside her husband, as into a sheltering darkness where she
could mue herself and draw breath. She had stood for the
previous half-hour in a merciless glare, beaten upon, stared
out of countenance, it fairly seemed to her, by intimations of
her mistake. For what she was most immediately feeling was
that she had, in the past, been active, for these people, to ends
that were now bearing fruit and that might yet bear a larger
crop. She but brooded, at rst, in her corner of the carriage:
it was like burying her exposed face, a face too helplessly
exposed, in the cool lap of the common indierence, of
the dispeopled streets, of the closed shops and darkened
houses seen through the window of the brougham, a world
mercifully unconscious and unreproachful. It wouldn’t, like
the world she had just left, know sooner or later what she had
done, or would know it, at least, only if the nal consequence
should be some quite overwhelming publicity. She xed this
possibility itself so hard, however, for a few moments, that the
misery of her fear produced the next minute a reaction; and
when the carriage happened, while it grazed a turn, to catch
the straight shaft from the lamp of a policeman in the act
of playing his inquisitive ash over an opposite house-front,
she let herself wince at being thus incriminated only that
she might protest, not less quickly, against mere blind terror.
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It had become, for the occasion, preposterously, terror—of
which she must shake herself free before she could properly
measure her ground. e perception of this necessity had in
truth soon aided her; since she found, on trying, that, lurid as
her prospect might hover there, she could none the less give
it no name. e sense of seeing was strong in her, but she
clutched at the comfort of not being sure of what she saw.
Not to know what it would represent on a longer view was a
help, in turn, to not making out that her hands were embrued;
since if she had stood in the position of a producing cause
she should surely be less vague about what she had produced.
is, further, in its way, was a step toward reecting that
when one’s connection with any matter was too indirect
to be traced it might be described also as too slight to be
deplored. By the time they were nearing Cadogan Place she
had in fact recognised that she couldn’t be as curious as she
desired without arriving at some conviction of her being as
innocent. But there had been a moment, in the dim desert of
Eaton Square, when she broke into speech.
“It’s only their defending themselves so much more than
they need—it’s only THAT that makes me wonder. It’s their
having so remarkably much to say for themselves.”
Her husband had, as usual, lighted his cigar, remaining
apparently as busy with it as she with her agitation. “You
mean it makes you feel that you have nothing?” To which, as
she made no answer, the Colonel added: “What in the world
did you ever suppose was going to happen? e man’s in a
position in which he has nothing in life to do.”
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Her silence seemed to characterise this statement as
supercial, and her thoughts, as always in her husband’s
company, pursued an independent course. He made her, when
they were together, talk, but as if for some other person; who
was in fact for the most part herself. Yet she addressed herself
with him as she could never have done without him. “He has
behaved beautifully—he did from the rst. I’ve thought it, all
along, wonderful of him; and I’ve more than once, when I’ve
had a chance, told him so. erefore, therefore—!” But it died
away as she mused.
“erefore he has a right, for a change, to kick up his
heels?”
“It isn’t a question, of course, however,” she undivertedly
went on, “of their behaving beautifully apart. It’s a question of
their doing as they should when together—which is another
matter.”
“And how do you think then,” the Colonel asked with
interest, “that, when together, they SHOULD do? e less
they do, one would say, the better—if you see so much in it.”
His wife, at this, appeared to hear him. “I don’t see in it
what YOU’D see. And don’t, my dear,” she further answered,
“think it necessary to be horrid or low about them. ey’re
the last people, really, to make anything of that sort come in
right.”
“I’m surely never horrid or low,” he returned, “about
anyone but my extravagant wife. I can do with all our
friends—as I see them myself: what I can’t do with is the
gures you make of them. And when you take to adding your
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gures up—!” But he exhaled it again in smoke.
“My additions don’t matter when you’ve not to pay the
bill.” With which her meditation again bore her through
the air. “e great thing was that when it so suddenly came
up for her he wasn’t afraid. If he had been afraid he could
perfectly have prevented it. And if I had seen he was—if I
hadn’t seen he wasn’t—so,” said Mrs. Assingham, “could I.
So,” she declared, “WOULD I. It’s perfectly true,” she went
on—”it was too good a thing for her, such a chance in life,
not to be accepted. And I LIKED his not keeping her out of
it merely from a fear of his own nature. It was so wonderful
it should come to her. e only thing would have been if
Charlotte herself couldn’t have faced it. en, if SHE had
not had condence, we might have talked. But she had it to
any amount.”
“Did you ask her how much?” Bob Assingham patiently
inquired.
He had put the question with no more than his usual
modest hope of reward, but he had pressed, this time, the
sharpest spring of response. “Never, never—it wasn’t a time
to ‘ask.’ Asking is suggesting—and it wasn’t a time to suggest.
One had to make up one’s mind, as quietly as possible, by
what one could judge. And I judge, as I say, that Charlotte
felt she could face it. For which she struck me at the time
as—for so proud a creature—almost touchingly grateful. e
thing I should never forgive her for would be her forgetting
to whom it is her thanks have remained most due.”
“at is to Mrs. Assingham?”
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She said nothing for a little—there were, after all,
alternatives. “Maggie herself of course—astonishing little
Maggie.”
“Is Maggie then astonishing too?”—and he gloomed out
of his window.
His wife, on her side now, as they rolled, projected the
same look. “I’m not sure that I don’t begin to see more in
her than—dear little person as I’ve always thought—I ever
supposed there was. I’m not sure that, putting a good many
things together, I’m not beginning to make her out rather
extraordinary.”
“You certainly will if you can,” the Colonel resignedly
remarked.
Again his companion said nothing; then again she broke
out. “In fact—I do begin to feel it—Maggie’s the great
comfort. I’m getting hold of it. It will be SHE who’ll see us
through. In fact she’ll have to. And she’ll be able.”
Touch by touch her meditation had completed it, but
with a cumulative eect for her husband’s general sense of
her method that caused him to overow, whimsically enough,
in his corner, into an ejaculation now frequent on his lips for
the relief that, especially in communion like the present, it
gave him, and that Fanny had critically traced to the quaint
example, the aboriginal homeliness, still so delightful, of Mr.
Verver. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy!”
“If she is, however,” Mrs. Assingham continued, “she’ll
be extraordinary enough—and that’s what I’m thinking of.
But I’m not indeed so very sure,” she added, “of the person
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to whom Charlotte ought in decency to be most grateful. I
mean I’m not sure if that person is even almost the incredible
little idealist who has made her his wife.”
“I shouldn’t think you would be, love,” the Colonel with
some promptness responded. “Charlotte as the wife of an
incredible little idealist—!” His cigar, in short, once more,
could alone express it.
“Yet what is that, when one thinks, but just what she
struck one as more or less persuaded that she herself was
really going to be?”—this memory, for the full view, Fanny
found herself also invoking.
It made her companion, in truth, slightly gape. “An
incredible little idealist—Charlotte herself?”
“And she was sincere,” his wife simply proceeded “she
was unmistakably sincere. e question is only how much is
left of it.”
“And that—I see—happens to be another of the questions
you can’t ask her. You have to do it all,” said Bob Assingham,
“as if you were playing some game with its rules drawn up—
though who’s to come down on you if you break them I don’t
quite see. Or must you do it in three guesses—like forfeits on
Christmas eve?” To which, as his ribaldry but dropped from
her, he further added: “How much of anything will have to
be left for you to be able to go on with it?”
“I shall go on,” Fanny Assingham a trie grimly declared,
“while there’s a scrap as big as your nail. But we’re not yet,
luckily, reduced only to that.” She had another pause, holding
the while the thread of that larger perception into which her
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view of Mrs. Verver’s obligation to Maggie had suddenly
expanded. “Even if her debt was not to the others—even
then it ought to be quite suciently to the Prince himself
to keep her straight. For what, really, did the Prince do,”
she asked herself, “but generously trust her? What did he
do but take it from her that if she felt herself willing it was
because she felt herself strong? at creates for her, upon my
word,” Mrs. Assingham pursued, “a duty of considering him,
of honourably repaying his trust, which—well, which she’ll
be really a end if she doesn’t make the law of her conduct.
I mean of course his trust that she wouldn’t interfere with
him—expressed by his holding himself quiet at the critical
time.”
e brougham was nearing home, and it was perhaps this
sense of ebbing opportunity that caused the Colonel’s next
meditation to ower in a fashion almost surprising to his
wife. ey were united, for the most part, but by his exhausted
patience; so that indulgent despair was generally, at the best,
his note. He at present, however, actually compromised with
his despair to the extent of practically admitting that he had
followed her steps. He literally asked, in short, an intelligent,
well nigh a sympathising, question. “Gratitude to the Prince
for not having put a spoke in her wheel—that, you mean,
should, taking it in the right way, be precisely the ballast of
her boat?”
“Taking it in the right way.” Fanny, catching at this gleam,
emphasised the proviso.
“But doesn’t it rather depend on what she may most feel
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