Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/202

THE GOLDEN BOWL as she sat near him, pass his arm about her. "I guess I don't feel as if you had 'moved' very far. You've only moved next door."

"Well," she continued, "I don't feel as if it were fair for me just to have given you a push and left you so. If I've made the difference for you I must think of the difference."

"Then what, darling," he indulgently asked, "do you think?"

"That's just what I don't yet know. But I must find out. We must think together—as we've always thought. What I mean," she went on after a moment, "is that it strikes me I ought to at least offer you some alternative. I ought to have worked one out for you."

"An alternative to what?"

"Well, to your simply missing what you've lost—without anything being done about it."

"But what have I lost?"

She thought a minute, as if it were difficult to say, yet as if she more and more saw it. "Well, whatever it was that before kept us from thinking, and kept you, really, as you might say, in the market. It was as if you couldn't be in the market when you were married to me. Or rather as if I kept people off, innocently, by being married to you. Now that I'm married to some one else you're, as in consequence, married to nobody. Therefore you may be married to anybody, to everybody. People don't see why you shouldn't be married to them."

"Isn't it enough of a reason," he mildly enquired, "that I don't want to be?" 172