Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/107

THE PRINCE been more enlisted than he allowed. "Do you mean," he presently asked, "that he had already forgot about Charlotte?"

She faced round as if he had touched a spring. "He wanted to, naturally—and it was much the best thing he could do." She was in possession of the main case, as it truly seemed; she had it all now. "He was capable of the effort, and he took the best way. Remember too what Maggie then seemed to us."

"She's very nice, but she always seems to me more than anything else the young woman who has a million a year. If you mean that that's what she especially seemed to him you of course place the thing in your light. The effort to forget Charlotte couldn't, I grant you, have been so difficult."

This pulled her up but for an instant. "I never said he didn't from the first—I never said that he doesn't more and more like Maggie's money."

"I never said I shouldn't have liked it myself," Bob Assingham returned. He made no movement; he smoked another minute. "How much did Maggie know?"

"How much?" She seemed to consider—as if it were between quarts and gallons—how best to express the quantity. "She knew what Charlotte, in Florence, had told her."

"And what had Charlotte told her?"

"Very little."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Why this—that she couldn't tell her." And she explained a little what she meant. "There are things, my dear—haven't you felt it yourself, coarse as you 77