Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/132

THE GOLDEN BOWL developed—"she doesn't miss things. I mean if you love her—or rather, I should say, if she loves you. She lets it go."

The Prince frowned a little—as a tribute after all to seriousness. "She lets what—?"

"Anything—anything that you might do and that you don't. She lets everything go but her own disposition to be kind to you. It's of herself that she asks efforts—so far as she ever has to ask them. She hasn't, much. She does everything herself. And that's terrible."

The Prince had listened; but, always with propriety, didn't commit himself. "Terrible?"

"Well, unless one's almost as good as she. It makes too easy terms for one. It takes stuff within one, so far as one's decency is concerned, to stand it. And nobody," Charlotte continued in the same manner, "is decent enough, good enough, to stand it—not without help from religion or something of that kind. Not without prayer and fasting—that is without taking great care. Certainly," she said, "such people as you and I are not."

The Prince, obligingly, thought an instant. "Not good enough to stand it?"

"Well, not good enough not rather to feel the strain. We happen each, I think, to be of the kind that are easily spoiled."

Her friend again, for propriety, followed the argument. "Oh I don't know. May not one's affection for her do something more for one's decency, as you call it, than her own generosity—her own affection, her 'decency'—has the unfortunate virtue to undo?" 102