Page:The Golden Bowl (Scribner, New York, 1909), Volume 1.djvu/205

THE PRINCE "Well, I feel her to be formidable. When they cast a spell it comes to the same thing. I think she'd do anything."

"Oh well, I'd help you," the Princess said with decision, "as against her—if that's all you require. It's too funny," she went on before he again spoke, "that Mrs. Rance should be here at all. But if you talk of the life we lead much of it's altogether, I'm bound to say, too funny. The thing is," Maggie developed under this impression, "that I don't think we lead, as regards other people, any life at all. We don't at any rate, it seems to me, lead half the life we might. And so it seems, I think, to Amerigo. So it seems also, I'm sure, to Fanny Assingham."

Mr. Verver—as if from due regard for these persons—considered a little. "What life would they like us to lead?"

"Oh it's not a question, I think, on which they quite feel together. She thinks, dear Fanny, that we ought to be greater."

"Greater—?" He echoed it vaguely. "And Amerigo too, you say?"

"Ah yes"—her reply was prompt—"but Amerigo doesn't mind. He doesn't care, I mean, what we do. It's for us, he considers, to see things exactly as we wish. Fanny herself," Maggie pursued, "thinks he's magnificent. Magnificent, I mean, for taking everything as it is, for accepting the 'social limitations' of our life, for not missing what we don't give him."

Mr. Verver attended. "Then if he doesn't miss it his magnificence is easy." 175