Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/115

THE PRINCE She was high, she was lucid, she was almost inspired; and it was but the deeper drop therefore to her husband's flat common sense. "In other words Maggie is, by her ignorance, in danger? Then if she's in danger, there is danger."

"There won't be—with Charlotte's understanding of it. That's where she has had her conception of being able to be heroic, of being able in fact to be sublime. She is, she will be"—the good lady by this time glowed. "So she sees it—to become, for her best friend, an element of positive safety."

Bob Assingham looked at it hard. "Which of them do you call her best friend?"

She gave a toss of impatience. "I'll leave you to discover!" But the grand truth thus made out she had now completely adopted. "It's for us therefore to be hers."

"'Hers'?"

"You and I. It's for us to be Charlotte's. It's for us on our side to see her through."

"Through her sublimity?"

"Through her noble lonely life. Only—that's essential—it mustn't be lonely. It will be all right if she marries."

"So we're to marry her?"

"We're to marry her. It will be," Mrs. Assingham continued, "the great thing I can do." She made it out more and more. "It will make up."

"Make up for what?" As she said nothing, however, his desire for lucidity renewed itself. "If everything's so all right what is there to make up for?" 85