Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/122

THE GOLDEN BOWL "I hate to encourage you—and for such a purpose, after all—to spend your money."

She had stood a stair or two below him; where, while she looked up at him beneath the high domed light of the hall, she rubbed with her palm the polished mahogany of the balustrade, which was mounted on fine ironwork, eighteenth-century English. "Because you think I must have so little? I've enough, at any rate—enough for us to take our hour. Enough," she had smiled, "is as good as a feast! And then," she had said, "it isn't of course a question of anything expensive, gorged with treasure as Maggie is; it isn't a question of competing or outshining. What, naturally, in the way of the priceless, hasn't she got? Mine is to be the offering of the poor—something precisely that no rich person could ever give her, and that, being herself too rich ever to buy it, she would therefore never have." Charlotte had spoken as if after so much thought. "Only as it can't be fine it ought to be funny—and that's the sort of thing to hunt for. Hunting in London, besides, is amusing in itself."

He recalled even how he had been struck with her word. "'Funny'?"

"Oh I don't mean a comic toy—I mean some little thing with a charm. But absolutely right, in its comparative cheapness. That's what I call funny," she had explained. "You used," she had also added, "to help me to get things cheap in Rome. You were splendid for beating down. I have them all still, I needn't say—the little bargains I there owed you. There are bargains in London in August." 92