Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/104

THE GOLDEN BOWL, but delayed, week after week, in Paris, were at last really coming. They were coming—that is Maggie was—largely to see her, and above all to be with her there. It was all altered—by Charlotte's going to Florence. She went from one day to the other—you forget everything. She gave her reasons, but I thought it odd at the time; I had a sense that something must have happened. The difficulty was that though I knew a little I didn't know enough. I didn't know her relation with him had been, as you say, a 'near' thing—that is I didn't know how near. The poor girl's departure was a flight—she went to save herself."

He had listened more than he showed—as came out in his tone. "To save herself?"

"Well, also really I think to save him too. I saw it afterwards—I see it all now. He'd have been sorry—he didn't want to hurt her."

"Oh I dare say," the Colonel laughed. "They generally don't!"

"At all events," his wife pursued, "she escaped—they both did; for they had had simply to face it. Their marriage couldn't be, and, if that was so, the sooner they put the Apennines between them the better. It had taken them, it's true, some time to feel this and to find it out. They had met constantly, and not always publicly, all that winter; they had met more than was known—though it was a good deal known. More, certainly," she said, "than I then imagined—though I don't know what difference it would after all have made with me. I liked him, I thought him charming, from the first of our knowing 74